Bijan Robinson scored two rushing touchdowns on Monday Night Football, Brian Robinson Jr. scored three, and the box score legitimately just says “B. Robinson” five different times in a row.
The Atlanta Falcons beat New Orleans 45-24 at Caesars Superdome, and ESPN’s recap notes it was the first time in Brian Robinson Jr.’s career he’d scored three rushing touchdowns in one game. That’s a genuinely funny stat line. It’s also hiding the actual problem for the rest of the NFC South, and that problem has nothing to do with two guys sharing a surname.
https://x.com/NFL/status/2107312381928128794
Bijan did his damage early. He opened the game with a 59-yard touchdown run, added a 4-yard score before the first quarter ended, and finished with 145 yards on 19 carries. By the time Brian Robinson Jr. punched in three more from 4, 8, and 11 yards out, nobody in that building cared about anything except the surname.
https://x.com/NFL/status/2107309158215324124
Fine, it’s an objectively great bit.
https://x.com/JonnyRoot_/status/2107314893028569547
I had the Saints plus the points and a same-game parlay that died somewhere around Brian Robinson Jr.’s second touchdown, which tells you nothing about this Falcons backfield and everything about why I keep losing money on Monday nights.
But that’s not even the most interesting part. Atlanta out-rushed New Orleans 207-50, and that gap didn’t come from one back wearing down a tired defense by himself. It came from two of them splitting the workload all night, which means slowing Bijan down in the first half bought New Orleans exactly nothing once Brian Robinson Jr. took over.
New Orleans actually clawed back to 14-7 when Alvin Kamara scored a rushing touchdown of his own, and for about a possession this looked like a football game. Then the other Robinson showed up.
That’s the real problem, and it isn’t going away once the Saints figure out which Robinson is which. Atlanta doesn’t have a bell-cow back and a backup who spells him for a series. It has two guys who can both carry a game on the same night, and no defensive coordinator has a rotation built for that.
Tyler Shough still threw for 286 yards and found Chris Olave enough to keep this from getting completely out of hand, but 30-of-48 for one touchdown doesn’t mean much when your run defense just got embarrassed by two different people. This is the same NFC South that couldn’t win a game in September trying to find answers in October, and right now the answers are in short supply.
Falcons are 2-2. Saints are 1-3. And somewhere out there, a fantasy manager who started both Robinsons just won his week without doing a single thing right all season.
