Atlanta Falcons: Arthur Smith’s play-calling has been horrendous

There were many reasons that the Atlanta Falcons were not able to come away with a win against San Francisco, and among those reasons is because of their head coaches awful situational playcalling.

There have been moments throughout the year where he has had questionable decisions but none stood out more than a few plays during this past game.

Some of the Falcons offensive play-calling leaves you scratching your head

Arthur Smith has a lot of questions to answer if he wants to be the Falcons head coach a few years down the road, if he continues making some of the awful decisions, he may be fired as early as the conclusion of next season.

The first play that really stood out came at the very beginning of the game when the Falcons had a goal-to-go situation. Arthur opted to run a pass play to try and trick the defense, which is not a bad idea. What is a bad idea is leaving your talented rookie tight end, Kyle Pitts, in to block while running your blocking tight end on a pass route as the main target.

Lee Smith has averaged about 8 targets a season during his career, but you decide to run him on a route in the endzone over your leading receiver? It is mindboggling why he would think that was a good idea, and this is not the first time he has done something like that.

Another note about that sequence of play-calling is that they should have just tried attempted to run a fullback dive, a quarterback sneak, or simply tried to run the ball straight up the middle with  Mike Davis. In his defense though, the offensive line has not shown that they can maul opponents, so that is probably why they thought they had to overthink it.

The last play that really stands out was near the end of the game when the Falcons had a fourth and less than a yard to go. A simple quarterback sneak would seemingly be the easiest thing to run, but instead, they ran a toss play to Patterson and it was stuffed behind the line.

Keep in mind that he made this decision knowing how fast the 49ers linebackers are, no excuses on this play, they should have had Matt Ryan take it under the center and sneak it.

These are the plays during a game that can ultimately lose you the game, who knows how much different this game would have gone with better play-calling but these are significant issues that Arthur Smith must figure out.