Penix Starts Thursday. The Secondary Behind Him Is a Different Problem.

Michael Penix Jr. is active and set to start against Green Bay on Thursday, which is the good news. The quarterback situation that swallowed Atlanta's first two weeks — Cooper Rush's back, Tua's oblique, the whole cascading mess — is at least temporarily resolved. Penix is healthy enough to play.

What he's inheriting on the other side of the ball is less tidy. A.J. Terrell Jr. is now on injured reserve, which removes the team's most accomplished cornerback from the equation entirely. The depth behind him at corner was already thin before Terrell went down — Darnay Holmes is the next man up, and the drop-off between the two is significant. The safety picture isn't much better: Jessie Bates is a legitimate starter, but the falloff to the backup safety spot is steep enough to be a real liability on any given Thursday night.

Green Bay will know all of this. They'll have had the same week to look at Atlanta's secondary that everyone else has had, and the Falcons don't have the personnel to disguise the holes. Penix can move the ball — Bijan Robinson and Kyle Pitts Sr. give him real weapons — but this game may come down to whether Atlanta can outscore what Green Bay finds in that secondary.

That's not a comfortable position for a team that already spent last season winning more games than its point differential suggested it should.