Falcons Punditry Check: Drake London Has Cost the Field 20 Straight Bad Grades, and Nobody Has Ever Been Right About Atlanta in January | MissedTakes Daily

The single worst thing you can do on the Atlanta Falcons beat, judged by our grading, is have an opinion about Drake London. Twenty graded takes name him. They average 21.7 accuracy and a skill delta of -44.5 — comfortably the worst of any Falcon we hold enough calls on to measure.

The 2025 wreckage is specific. Andrew Erickson called London the overall fantasy WR1 ("that is my mile take") and also put him at 15 receiving touchdowns; London finished WR17 and scored 7, and the touchdown call graded 0 with a -154.2 skill delta. Derek Brown made the same WR1-overall call twice, once as a round-two sleeper, which graded 0 at -200 because the bar was simply London repeating his own WR6 finish. Gregg Rosenthal said it "wouldn't shock me at all" if London went first-team All-Pro: 0, -200. Erickson's overall record is 57.03 accuracy across 143 graded takes, so this is not a bad pundit — it is one player who has eaten a lot of good ones.

The reversal is already in the file, ungraded. Steve Krebs has London in a 2026 bust column twice in two days, arguing a top-10 receiver price is unpayable "with all that's surrounding the starting quarterback." That is the whole Atlanta argument in one clause.

The quarterback room is where everyone is talking, and where they've been least wrong

Atlanta named Tua Tagovailoa the Week 1 starter, and the field split immediately on how long that lasts. Albert Breer reports Cooper Rush as the backup for the opener and expects Michael Penix Jr. to "get an extended run." Zachary Pereles says a change "could be quickly in the offing." Lance Zierlein — currently No. 1 on the board at a 39.1 MissedTakes Score — thinks Tua gets a start and "probably should." Derek Brown goes furthest: "I think Jack Strand is going to make some starts this year. I don't have any faith in Pennix and Tua." All of it is pending.

The graded prior favors the people talking about this room. Atlanta quarterback takes are 27 graded at 84.3 accuracy and +16.5 skill; Penix specifically is 7 graded at 84.5 accuracy and +60.4 skill — the best-scoring Falcon subject on the board. Receiver takes, by contrast, are 34 graded at 31.1 accuracy and -40.6 skill.

Roster week just settled and it settled cleanly. Scott Kennedy called all three of Tua, Penix and undrafted rookie Strand onto the 53 — graded 100 with a +200 skill delta on Strand — plus the tight end trio and four receivers, including a +200 on Zachariah Branch. He is 9-for-9 at 100 accuracy, a 64.29 score, and still flagged provisional: nine calls is nine calls, and provisional records stay off the leaderboard. On the other side, Tyler Sullivan put Strand on the practice squad (0, -200) and Carter Bahns suggested Rush "might have to sign elsewhere" (0, -200).

Priced right, then talked into the playoffs

Atlanta's punditry is 360 takes, 149 of them graded — a real file, not a thin one. And it has a clear shape.

Nine graded division-winner picks on Atlanta: 0 accuracy. Eight graded playoff-berth picks: 0 accuracy, -200 average skill. Seventeen game-outcome calls involving the Falcons: 35.3 accuracy, -20.7 skill — including a Week 9 pileup where Jonas Knox, Jason McIntyre and LaVar Arrington all took Atlanta at New England and lost 24-23, each at -156. Nick Wright took Atlanta to win outright on Sunday night in Week 7 ("I think the wrong team is favored"); it was 20-10 San Francisco, -167.

Yet the same field prices the team almost exactly right when asked for a number. Season win-total calls on Atlanta grade 86.7 accuracy, and the 2025 consensus was near-perfect: five calls of 8, 8, 8, 8 and 10 against an actual 8-9. Atlanta has finished 8-9 in each of the last two seasons and has not made the playoffs since 2017 in our records. Punditry knows this and keeps upgrading them anyway — Wright's newest call, from September 4, is Atlanta as his "deep sleeper," while John Breech has them 6-11 and third in the division.

Whose Atlanta calls have earned anything, at five graded or more: Kennedy (100 accuracy, 9), Rich Eisen (89.2, 10), Rosenthal (62.9, 6), Jaime Eisner (37.5 accuracy but +38.5 skill, all mock-draft picks where a shuffled mock scores 50), Kyle Crabbs (39.2, +35.7). At the bottom: Erickson, 0 accuracy across 5 Falcons calls. No logged reversals on Atlanta this week — the site's changed-their-mind file is empty league-wide.

The league day in brief

• 1,154 takes graded in seven days, every one of them a Roster Spot Call — the 53-man deadline flushing the whole preseason file at once. 468 new takes came in.
• Perfect scores went to Jared Koch on Brevin Jordan, Kennedy on Atlanta's quarterbacks, and Nathan Jahnke on PFF depth-chart projections — though Jahnke's unsigned PFF recap also produced several -200s in the same batch. Darius Slayton's survival cost both Paul Schwartz and Evan Tarracciano a zero.
• Standing consensus misses still lean 2025: the field was 6.3 wins high on Kansas City (13 calls) and 5 wins low on New England, Seattle and Denver.
• The 2025 MVP ballot: Matthew Stafford drew 26 of 100 picks and won it. Offensive Rookie of the Year went to Tetairoa McMillan, named on 5 of 29 ballots.

Full standings, with provisional records excluded, are on the leaderboard.