FLOWERY BRANCH -- For rookie cornerback Avery Williams there will be better days.
With Jaylinn Hawkins suffering a pregame ankle injury Sunday, Williams was forced into nickel-back duty against the Dallas Cowboys, and he had a rough day. Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb is still open.
“You just got to keep reassuring him and telling him that it’s going to get better,” Falcons defensive coordinator Dean Pees said of Williams. “It just goes back to fundamentals. You’ve got to play with great technique whether if you are in zone of if you are in man.”
If Hawkins had been available, Pees could have played him at safety and moved Erik Harris to nickel back, as he did against the Saints on Nov. 7.
“They are a talented group of receivers,” Pees said. “Really, whether if we had him on (Lamb). If we had him on (Amari) Cooper, or if we had him on (Cedric) Wilson, they all have talent.”
Williams was drafted in the fifth round out of Boise State. He won the job as the punt returner and could have been working on his fundamentals and techniques in practice and not in games if Isaiah Oliver weren’t injured. He suffered a season-ending knee injury when Washington running back J.D. McKissic nailed him on a blitz Oct. 3.
Since Oliver’s injury, the Falcons have been scrambling at the nickel back position. In addition to Williams, the Falcons have used Richie Grant, Darren Hall, Chris Williamson and Harris at nickel.
The Falcons are hoping that Williams can grow and learn from the Dallas game.
“Just the biggest thing is, he’s just so young,” Pees said. “What got him in trouble is that they have four very talented receivers. We tried during the game, at one point, to actually see if we could match up. The problem was that it’s hard to do that when you don’t practice it. We lost (Hawkins) right before the game started. So, we kind of had a thing going on there with him, but that didn’t pan out.”
So, Williams basically was going for it, fighting the best he could in a tough situation.
“You can say we can match this guy up on him,” Pees said. “But they’ve got three others, and you can’t match them up on all of them. The biggest thing is that everybody learns from their mistakes. So, hopefully he’ll learn from things that we talked about this week, on why certain things happened to him, and hopefully he’ll improve on it.”
Quarterbacks are completing 75% of their passes when throwing at Williams and have a passer rating of 128.5.
He’s not the only player struggling in the secondary. Right cornerback Fabian Moreau has 62% of his targets competed, and quarterbacks have a 125.8 passer rating when throwing his way.
Safety Duron Harmon has 81% completion rate and 132.4 passer rating.
That partially explains why quarterbacks don’t bother with left cornerback A.J. Terrell, who has a 47.4 completion rate and 65.7 passer rating.
Losing Hawkins was a big blow. He has a 50% completion percentage and 66.2 passer rating, second on the team behind Terrell. Pees considers Hawkins a starter, even though he plays in the safety rotation.
Pees made it clear that Harris would have moved to nickel if Hawkins had played.
“Erik and Duron had to take all the reps of safety,” Pees said. “It’s a depth issue more than it is necessarily a whole scheme issue. Sometimes you just got what you got. Guys have got to play.”
The Falcons considered taking the clearly struggling Williams out of the game.
“Sometimes, you like to take a guy out of the game and talk to him a little bit about what’s going on,” Pee said. “Generally, (we) don’t have that much opportunity because there’s nobody to take him out and talk to him.”
Former New England cornerback Tyrone Poole, on the “Real Talk Sports Show” on Tuesday, noted that he studied the Falcons’ secondary against the Cowboys. He noted that Moreau was playing out of position on several plays.
“He had the wrong leverage,” said Poole, who played at Fort Valley State. “He was giving up too much grass.”
Which means the grass, or open space, normally is where the receiver is going to go to get open.
Poole played in the NFL from 1995-2008 and started 112 of 144 NFL games.
Pees didn’t single out Moreau, but noted that there were several mistakes and mental errors in coverage.
“The big thing was the mistakes that we made,” Pees said. “Mental errors, zone coverage, our technique in man coverage and things like that. We have some chances to make plays we didn’t make them.
“That’s just like any week. Whether you win or lose, it’s always good or bad. We got to get rid of the things that you did bad. Some of the things that we didn’t do well, we need to improve on.”
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