Atlanta Falcons: Injury report gets team closer to Top 5 draft pick

The Atlanta Falcons injury report will make fans happy.

No one wants to see Atlanta Falcons on the injury report with anything serious, but when you are on track to get a Top 5 NFL draft pick, you are hoping to see guys get shutdown that isn’t 100 percent and that is exactly what we got this week.

The Falcons injury report for the game Sunday in LA against the Chargers has some very important names on it.

As of Saturday, the Atlanta Falcons will have four important starters miss the game out west – three on offense and one on defense. If you have not seen it yet, Julio Jones, Caleb McGary, James Carpenter, and Ricardo Allen are all out Sunday.

While the Falcons have not yet technically been eliminated from the playoffs, too much has to happen in order for them to grab the seventh seed in the NFC, and even then, missing out on a Top 5 pick isn’t worth being one and done simply to prolong what has been a horrible three-year run.

At this point, with just four games left in the 2020 season, Julio should just shut it down for the year. As a captain, he surely wants to be out there but it’s time he starts thinking ahead to 2021. He isn’t getting any younger and his body isn’t going to bounce back like it once was.

With both James Carpenter and Kaleb McGary out Sunday, Matt Ryan is surely going to take a bigger beating than he has. Not to say that Matt Hennessy and Matt Gono aren’t going to play well because they have at times but there is a reason that they don’t start.

McGary especially will be missed Sunday as the Falcons will face Joey Bosa. He did a pretty good job against Cam Jordan last week and it would have been nice to really measure how far he has come in a matchup against a guy like Bosa.

After Jordan had three sacks and three tackles for loss in the Saints/Falcons Week 11 matchup, McGary bounced back last week and held him to no sacks and no tackles for loss in their Week 13 rematch.

The Atlanta Falcons defense will miss Ricardo Allen for the third time in 2020.

Unlike the Falcons offense since the coaching change, the defense has played at a completely higher level than they had under Dan Quinn. According to Pro Football Focus, the Falcons have been one of the Top 10 defenses in the NFL since the change and are playing inspired football.

Chargers rookie quarterback Justin Herbert has been much better than many anticipated and he has some weapons on offense that will challenge the Falcons secondary. Allen not being in the backfield will certainly hurt the communication on the back end of the Atlanta defense on Sunday.

While it is no fun to have these guys in the injury report, the silver lining is hopefully it gets the Falcons closer to a Top 5 draft pick and makes the rebuild under the new regime a little bit faster.