Atlanta's Active Roster Lists Five Guards and Nobody at Center

Atlanta's roster carries a position label beside every name on it, and this morning those labels account for Tuesday afternoon more plainly than the club's release does. Every interior lineman listed Active in the building is labelled G. The letter C appears exactly once in the entire Atlanta payload, beside Gus Hartwig, No. 60, and the status line under his name reads Practice Squad.

The transaction underneath that is straightforward. Shortly before the 4 p.m. ET deadline on Tuesday, November 10, Atlanta sent center Ryan Neuzil to Baltimore for guard Andrew Vorhees and a 2028 sixth-round pick. Jordan Schultz reported the deal first and Adam Schefter reported which way the pick was travelling. Both rosters confirm it independently of the reporting: ESPN carries Vorhees as a G, Active, in Atlanta and Neuzil as a C, Active, in Baltimore.

ESPN's Jamison Hensley calls the pick conditional, and NFL.com's Kevin Patra and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Daniel Flick, citing a team source, print it the same way. Nobody has published the condition. The club's release did not print the round or the year at all — its headline calls the compensation an undisclosed draft choice — and where Monday's release on the Jessie Bates III sale carried a general manager's quote, Tuesday's quotes nobody.

On November 2 I took the charge that Atlanta's run game had failed because the line could not run block, granted that the grievance under it was real, and corrected the arithmetic while refusing the mechanism. The three men in that paragraph — Matthew Bergeron, Ryan Neuzil and Chris Lindstrom — were each listed active, none carried a row on the league injury board, and I declined to name a cause. Eight days later the club sold one of the three. That removes a term from the argument rather than settling it, and I did not anticipate the move.

### The two career lines

Ryan Neuzil has made all 38 of his career starts at center. The figure is Hensley's, and the AJC and the club release both land on 38. He started every one of the Falcons' last 26 games, a run that began after Drew Dalman, and all nine this season. He is 29, in the final year of his contract, and Baltimore absorbs the prorated remainder of a $4.05 million salary, per Pro Football Rumors.

Andrew Vorhees has 22 career starts in 37 appearances. The club release, Pro Football Rumors and NBC Sports each print the 22 independently; the 37 is re-derived here from four ESPN season eventlogs. Seventeen came last season at left guard, which both ESPN and the AJC state outright, and no source anywhere in this record places him at center in any season. He played five of Baltimore's nine games this year, started two, and has taken 81 snaps, per NBC Sports. Hensley's reading of those 17 starts is that he struggled in them, and that Baltimore replaced him in the offseason by signing John Simpson.

So Atlanta sold a career of 38 starts at one position and took back a career of 22 at a different one. ESPN's own transaction note says the move "gives the Falcons additional depth at the guard position behind starters Chris Lindstrom and Matthew Bergeron," and the AJC reads it the same way. Those are the two men I named on November 2, and the arriving player has been slotted behind one of them.

### One name moved on a published chart

Twelve days ago I published Atlanta's first team off ESPN's depth chart as Jake Matthews, Matthew Bergeron, Ryan Neuzil, Chris Lindstrom and Jawaan Taylor. Read at 6:49:30 this morning, the same chart reads Matthews, Bergeron, Levin, Lindstrom, Taylor. Four names held. One moved. Both are descriptions of a published document twelve days apart, and neither forecasts anything.

Count the rest of that chart and center is the only line position carrying a single name. Left tackle holds three, left guard two, right guard two — Lindstrom first, Vorhees second — and right tackle four. Center holds Corey Levin and nobody behind him.

The active roster underneath it has the same shape. Five players are listed Active and labelled G: Bergeron, Lindstrom, Levin, Kyle Hinton and Vorhees. None is labelled C. The only C in the payload is Hartwig, signed to the practice squad on Tuesday — the same afternoon the club traded its starting center — and confirmed by ESPN, the club release and the roster endpoint. He has never been mentioned in this column. Neither has Vorhees, and neither has Levin: three men are now central to Atlanta's interior line four days before Kansas City arrive, and the reader has met none of them here.

Two Tuesday moves were not trades and fall outside the four o'clock deadline: Atlanta released Nick Folk and signed kicker Jake Moody off Baltimore's practice squad, now listed PK and Active.

### Callahan's room

Corey Levin is 32 and has played more than 90 NFL games with seven career starts. Wikipedia's season narrative assigns at least four of the seven to center, three in 2022 and one in 2024, and leaves the other three positionally unassigned by any source I read. His offensive work this season has been as an extra blocker in jumbo packages, per the AJC. ESPN's roster calls him a guard; ESPN's depth chart, pulled the same morning, lists him at center.

He has also worked in this room before, somewhere else. Hensley reports that Levin has worked with offensive line coach Bill Callahan at Tennessee. Callahan is already on this record here — Atlanta named him to the job on January 20, 2026 — and that continuity is the cheapest asset a 3-6 club has this week. It is a claim about familiarity rather than about quality.

It is also the end of what the evidence supports. What a center does at the line of scrimmage that a guard does not — the calls, the identification, the exchange itself — is not established by any source in front of me, and I will not assert it from memory and dress it as analysis. The structure is what is established.

Four outlets have now projected that Levin starts there: Hensley, The Athletic's Josh Kendall, NBC hedging further still, and Tori McElhaney on the club's own site, a reporter on a club platform rather than the club speaking. Every one is a projection, and none rests on a club statement, because there is not one. The release quotes no club official at all; the Levin line inside it is McElhaney's, not the club's. The AJC declined to project at all and printed the depth-chart fact instead, that the Falcons' backup center is Corey Levin and that he has seven career starts.

Patra graded the deadline. The Neuzil swap came out C+ on both sides, the most neutral verdict in his package; the Bates trade came out B+ for Jacksonville and A- for Atlanta, awarded in the same breath as the concession that dealing Bates "hurts the Falcons' chances of taking the division down the stretch." I closed Tuesday morning's piece on a 2027 second that cannot play in a division Atlanta sits one loss out of. Patra concedes the cost and grades it well regardless.

Atlanta has spent this season arguing about whether the five men in front of Michael Penix Jr. can block, and I have twice written that the thing failing is somewhere else. Tuesday put a narrower question underneath all of it: losing a man who had started 38 games at one position says nothing about how anybody blocks. Every play this offense runs for the rest of the season begins with a snap. The roster ESPN carried at 6:49 this morning lists five men under the letter that names a guard, and under the letter that names the job of taking that snap, it lists one — on the practice squad.