When Falcons coach Dan Quinn woke Friday, he was likely seeing red and yellow.
Red for the red-zone woes and yellow for all of the penalties.
The Falcons were flagged 15 times for 135 yards in the 18-12 loss to the Eagles on Thursday night and that, and a rain delay, helped to leak the game into early Friday morning.
There was a vast assortment of penalties as the Eagles were called for 10 penalties for 101 yards.
» Dan Quinn: 'We have some spots we need to clean up'
“The pre-snap ones, I know (Falcons defensive tackle Grady Jarrett) thought he could take his guy to the side on the quarterback hit,” Quinn said. “Some of the personal-foul ones were wrong. I didn’t get a chance to see (Falcons tackle Ryan) Schraeder’s on his. I saw (Falcons tight end Eric) Saubert’s; I thought that was a face mask for sure. I thought down the field, I don’t have a good view on that part of it.”
The game may been a statistical outlier.
“In 256 games last NFL season, there was only one game with 24 or more penalties -- the Tampa Bay-Miami game in Week 11 when the Tony Corrente crew called 26 penalties for 205 yards. The 2018 season opener between the Falcons and the Eagles featured 26 penalties for 236 yards,” longtime NFL writer Rick Gosselin noted in a tweet.
In addition to fixing their red-zone scoring problems, the Falcons must cut down on their penalties, too.
“It is going to happen,” free safety Ricardo Allen said. “Some of the penalties can be on both sides. Some should have been called, and some shouldn’t have been called. It is what it is, and we have to address the style of play. We know that there are going to be penalties, and we just have to minimize them when it is on crucial downs.”
The normally penalty-free Schraeder was called for two personal fouls. One was a nasty block on Eagles defensive tackle Fletcher Cox.
“Yeah, that was tough,” Schraeder said. “I didn’t necessarily agree with them, but you know that’s the way it is when the refs call the game. You just have to keep playing…I have to fix them.”
