Toughness was the key for the Falcons this offseason, and now we find out if it pays off.
Even when the Falcons' defenses during the Mike Smith era were good, they weren't particularly tough. They got by with discipline, finesse, and occasionally outright chaos, as was the case during Mike Nolan's first, actually successful year in Atlanta. The team tried to fix that by adding Tyson Jackson and Paul Soliai to the front, but simply put, it didn't work.
The Falcons of 2015 weren't much better, frankly, as evinced by the putrid Buccaneers game where they let Jameis Winston escape from pressure and run for a long first down in one of the most legitimately embarrassing sequences I've seen from this team in 25 years of being a fan.