It feels like Raheem Morris would have hired Jeff Ulbrich as defensive coordinator in early 2024 if that had been an option, so him being the defensive coordinator in 2025 isn’t a big surprise. As Tre’Shon Diaz wrote last night, Morris values his relationships with coaches he knows and trusts, so the hire we half-expected is one we should have expected although the interview list increased last week.
The last time Morris was the head coach and Ulbrich the defensive coordinator was in a 2020 season that was doomed from the start, with both men thrust into larger roles than expected following Dan’s firing Quinn and they were tasked with finishing a season that started 0-5. That season’s modest success — Morris and Ulbrich coaxed a team from 4-7 to finish 4-12, and neither of them stayed in Atlanta — would have deterred many coaches to return to the same well. Morris is not one of those coaches, for better or worse.
Why Ulbrich? The answer is actually easy to provide, but whether it is satisfactory is a much more open question.
Why Morris chose Ulbrich
As I mentioned above, Morris is a man of relationships. He worked with Ulbrich continuously from 2015 to 2020, which is a small eternity in an NFL where coaching staffs break up and are regularly fired. Under difficult circumstances during their final year together, Morris and Ulbrich took a defense that had allowed more than 30 points in four of the first five weeks of the season and managed to allow more than 30 just twice the remainder of the game, both against the eventual Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
If that stint and relationship hadn’t impacted Morris, Ulbrich wouldn’t be Atlanta’s defensive coordinator now. But Ulbrich is also much more experienced than he was when he took on the role in 2020, as he spent the last four years as defensive coordinator (and eventually interim head coach) for a talented defense of the Jets. He and Robert Saleh had this group singing in 2022 and 2023, but with Saleh fired and Ulbrich taking over in 2024, things took a turn for the worse last year.
Is Ulbrich a solid coordinator? I’d say his results in Atlanta and New York suggest that yes, he is, and if you give him quality pieces, he’ll likely give you a solid defense. But while Morris will surely talk about Ulbrich’s insight, it’s at least as much about where Morris and Ulbrich share common ground on approach, confidence and vision for the franchise. Morris saw Lake fading and concluded he needed someone who would both knows him and knows what it means to be an NFL coordinator, and Ulbrich was the more experienced candidate in both regards.
The results of the 2020 season likely also played a role in another way.
This time Morris and Ulbrich can plan ahead
On one hand, the Falcons are currently limited in terms of dollars and draft picks, making total defensive teardown and rebuilding a challenge. On the other hand, there are opportunities to add both picks (trade down!) and cap space (restructurings and cuts) that should allow both coaches to implement a vision for this defense.
You’ll recall that wasn’t an option in 2020. Crippled by years of Thomas Dimitroff and Dan Quinn working to keep together the core of an increasingly creaky former Super Bowl team, these Falcons limited themselves to a single unfortunate defensive attack (Dante Chasseur). Morris and Ulbrich, who went from defensive coordinator and linebackers coach to head coach and defensive coordinator in one fell swoop, didn’t get a chance to put together their own shopping list for the final 11 games of the season 2020. They just had to work with what they had, and the fact that it was better than what Quinn and Morris achieved in the first few weeks of the season is something Morris remembers clearly.
This time around, the duo will at least have a chance to work together to craft a defense that they might be able to squint at and tell looks like the one they want. Morris spent a year watching this defense in action and a few weeks off tinkering on his own to give him a better idea of where he wants to take this thing, and Ulbrich is jumping in after four years running the Jets defense from New York with ideas of his own. It’ll be less sloppy than 2020, which, as I hope you’ve figured out by now, is the pivot point around which I see this hiring rotating.
Will it work?
I’ll be frank: It will almost certainly be better, overall, than the Falcons’ 2024 defense. A late run from the pass rush and a handful of impressive efforts against the Eagles, Chiefs and Chargers didn’t help. couldn’t hide the fact that the unit was also slow, a touch missing across the board and not particularly well trained. Ulbrich is much more experienced and competent than Jimmy Lake from any angle you want to look at him from, and even if hiring Lake in the first place is an early disaster for Morris, he will likely trust Ulbrich to lead the defense and can hopefully focus on improving his own management in the game in a way that should also be positive after his struggles in that regard.
Ulbrich has not shown, other than arguably this stint in 2020, that he can significantly elevate what he has. What he has shown is that he can be a solid, if not quite good, defense with the right pieces. And that brings us to our next point.
I’ll be frank again: I don’t know how much improvement this team can expect unless the Falcons can pull off some minor miracles in terms of talent acquisition and development this spring and summer. Finding someone who has experience and respect from the players and head coach is a step in the right direction, but the Falcons will be shedding some talent from an already deficient defense this offseason and will need to replace that talent effectively.
If you have to lose David Onyemata and/or Grady Jarrett, it will fall to Ulbrich, Morris and whoever the new defensive line coach is to coach Ruke Orhorhoro, Brandon Dorlus and anyone else the team can add. . They’re going to have to get a lot more out of Troy Andersen, JD Bertrand and (hopefully healthy). maybe Nate Landman if the linebacker group has to be anything other than Kaden Elliss and Active Liabilities. They’re going to have to take Arnold Ebiketie to the next level and get off to a stronger start, get Bralen Trice back from injury and make an impact, and cobble together a useful secondary outside of AJ Terrell and Jessie Bates. There is considerable work to be done for this front office that Morris and Ulbrich will have a say in, but they also need to take the players already on the roster and get far more out of them than all but a small handful managed in 2024. It is a major challenge, which will test the courage of both men.
On one level, Ulbrich is likely to train in the sense that he will almost certainly be an upgrade over Jimmy Lake, who this team sorely needed. In a broader sense, Ulbrich (and Morris in turn) will need to achieve much more than modest improvements to this defense to make the 2025 season a success and ensure that both men remain in their positions beyond this season. come. You can convince me of that with a successful offseason and a strong summer, but before that, it’s vaporware.
If Ulbrich and Morris can implement something bigger and better than what they managed to do during these rushed and anxious days as interim coaches in 2020, then they have the chance to be celebrated as shrewd hires and much of the criticism and distrust that should follow them to the end. spring and summer will either be ridiculed or forgotten. Otherwise, neither the new defensive coordinator nor the coach who trusted his old friend will likely find their reunion more fruitful than the first go-around.
