The Falcons Just Made Bijan Robinson the Highest-Paid Running Back in the League. Someone Still Has to Throw Him the Ball.

Yesterday I wrote that Atlanta's quarterback crisis would swallow every dollar this front office has spent. Twenty-four hours later, they handed Bijan Robinson a three-year deal worth up to $75 million and made the argument for me.

Let's be clear about what Robinson is. Last season he carried 1,478 yards and seven touchdowns on the ground while adding 820 receiving yards and four more scores out of the backfield — a complete back, a genuine weapon, the kind of player who makes offensive coordinators sleep easier. The extension is defensible on talent alone, and at 24 years old, the production window is real. But the Falcons didn't sign a running back in a vacuum. They signed the highest-paid running back in the league into an offense that currently cannot identify its starting quarterback, whose top two signal-callers are both unavailable — one questionable, one sidelined by a back flare-up with an uncertain return — and whose backup option is Cooper Rush. The gap between a healthy starter and Rush is not a depth concern. It is a structural emergency. No running back, regardless of what you pay him, bridges that chasm.

History is instructive here, and it is not kind to this model. The great ground-game-first offenses of the modern era — the early 2010s San Francisco teams, the Ravens in their peak Ray Rice years — worked because they had quarterbacks who could punish defenses for stacking the box. Defenses don't stack the box against Cooper Rush. They stack the box because of Cooper Rush. Robinson will see eight men in the box in Week 1 if Tagovailoa or Penix Jr. isn't healthy, and no amount of talent converts those odds consistently. The Falcons finished 2025 outscored by nearly three points a game and won 4.6 more games than their point differential predicted — that is not a foundation, that is a warning. Regression is the most reliable force in football, and you cannot outrun it with a running back contract.

What makes this particularly sharp is the sequencing of the offseason. Atlanta locked up Kyle Pitts Sr. for three years and $54 million, Bergeron for four years and $96 million, and now Robinson for up to $75 million more. That is an enormous concentration of resources in the skill position group and the offensive line — all of it predicated on a functioning quarterback. My read is that the front office is betting Tagovailoa gets healthy and Penix Jr. eventually takes the wheel, and the Robinson deal is an expression of confidence that one of those two outcomes arrives. That may prove correct. But right now, today, neither quarterback is practicing at full speed, and the team's first-round edge rusher Jalon Walker is feared to have torn his ACL in training camp, meaning the defense that was supposed to compensate for offensive inconsistency just lost its most important young pass rusher before a regular season snap was played.

The Robinson extension is not a mistake in isolation. It becomes a mistake the moment you zoom out. Atlanta has built a gorgeous offensive skill group — Robinson, Pitts Sr., Drake London, a protected left guard — and surrounded it with quarterback uncertainty that no amount of ground game can paper over. The Falcons are one Tagovailoa setback away from running their $75 million back behind a starter who produces at a fraction of what even a league-average quarterback provides. That is the gamble. I think it fails unless the quarterback situation resolves itself, and resolves itself soon. The ground game is a feature. It was never supposed to be the whole plan.