A Four-Man Rush Without the Four

The Falcons blitzed at a 44.9% rate last season — the NFL's highest, nearly nine percentage points above second-place Minnesota. That approach produced 57 sacks, a franchise record, and a defense that led the league in yards allowed per game (244) and passing yards allowed per game (135). It also required two specific edge rushers to function.

Both are gone.

OLB coach John Timu acknowledged the structural shift this week. “Last year we achieved this through multiplicity and pressure,” he told reporters. “Now we got to do it from a four-man rush standpoint, and that’s the challenge.”

That challenge is not a euphemism. James Pearce Jr. is suspended for eight games. Jalon Walker is out for the season with a torn ACL. Together they produced 16 sacks last season, but the production number is not the point — their ability to win one-on-one pass-rush matchups is what made the blitz scheme viable. When your edge rushers can beat their assignments before coverage breaks down, sending extra pressure is a calculated advantage. When they can’t, it is a coverage breakdown waiting to happen.

Here is the irony Jeff Ulbrich is living inside: he has stated publicly that he does not want to be a heavy-pressure team. His preference — bring four, play coverage — was overridden in 2025 by the talent he had. Walker and Pearce were so disruptive that building the scheme around their edge rush, rather than around his philosophical preference, was the obvious call. The blitz-heavy identity was personnel-driven, not theory-driven.

Now the personnel is gone, and Ulbrich is being pushed into the four-man rush defense he always wanted — without a front four that can execute it.

Friday’s loss to Denver was the first evidence. The Falcons generated zero pressure from a four-man rush against the Broncos’ starting offensive line. One preseason game with key defensive starters held out, yes. But the snap-level evidence was the most revealing defensive film of the offseason — and it confirmed what Timu’s words already implied. The defense that produced a franchise-record sack total through blitz-based pressure has no mechanism to generate pressure without blitzing.

The in-house answer starts with Brandon Dorlus, who recorded 8.5 sacks last season from the interior and now appears on the first depth chart as a starting defensive end. The schematic logic of sliding an interior disruptor to the edge is sound — he has already proven he can win pass-rush one-on-ones — but moving him outside subtracts the interior disruption that made the blitz scheme work from the inside. One player filling a gap on the edge while creating one in the interior is not a solution. It is a redistribution.

Then there is Bralen Trice, the third-round pick from 2024 who has never played a regular-season NFL snap. He tore his left ACL in the preseason opener against Miami two years ago, reaggravated the same knee during 2025 training camp, and spent the season on injured reserve. It has been 735 days since his last NFL game of any kind. He was a two-time All-Pac-12 First Team selection at Washington, and the Falcons need that version of Trice. Whether that player still exists after two ACL-related setbacks in the same knee is the question no practice rep can answer.

Samson Ebukam, two years removed from an Achilles tear and coming off a two-sack 2025 comeback season, fills the veteran slot. Azeez Ojulari, who showed encouraging multi-category production Friday — three tackles, half a sack, a tackle for loss, a pass deflection — fills the prove-it role. Harold Perkins Jr., a sixth-round rookie from LSU, is absorbing first-team reps at the hybrid LB/EDGE alignment that Walker, a 15th-overall pick, held last year.

The Colts joint practices on Wednesday and Thursday at Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, are the next evaluation point that matters. Two days of controlled reps against Indianapolis’s starting offensive line will tell Ulbrich whether his front four can generate any pressure at all, or whether the defense must remain blitz-dependent with inferior personnel running the blitz. Joint practices offer more reps and more honest evaluation than any preseason game — this is the last extended window before 53-man roster cuts.

I wrote yesterday about what the Falcons lost in personnel. The deeper problem is what they lost in identity. The 2025 defense was the most successful in franchise history because the scheme was built around two specific players. Without them, the Falcons don’t just need replacement edge rushers. They need a replacement defense — and Wednesday is the first honest test of whether they have one.