The game turned on one swing. Cooper Rush, starting in place of the injured Tua Tagovailoa, threw an interception that T.J. Watt returned 35 yards for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter, and that was the cushion Pittsburgh needed. Rush finished 12-for-22 for 143 yards with a touchdown and two picks, sacked four times behind a line that had already lost a starting guard to a concussion during the game.
Rodgers wasn't spotless in his first game action of the year after sitting out the entire preseason. DK Metcalf caught only 4 of 10 targets and dropped a couple, and Jaylen Warren's ground game managed just 46 yards on 10 carries with a lost fumble. But Rodgers closed it out, completing 3 passes on a drive that ate the final 4:16 off the clock and took the ball out of Atlanta's hands for good.
For Atlanta, Bijan Robinson was the one bright spot in a game that had almost nothing else go right on offense — 83 rushing yards and 90 receiving yards on 8 catches, plus a touchdown, against a Pittsburgh defense that otherwise did what it needed to. Drake London and Kyle Pitts combined for one catch. Chris Lindstrom, the Falcons' starting guard, didn't finish the game after being diagnosed with a concussion, one more subtraction from a line already replacing a tackle lost to injured reserve days earlier.
The Falcons' pass rush, missing both of its top edge pieces before kickoff, never generated the pressure that might have rattled Rodgers into more mistakes than the one clean touchdown throw he made. Instead it was Atlanta's own quarterback who supplied the game's decisive turnover, and a defense that had shown some life through three quarters had nothing left to answer with once Watt made his play.
Pittsburgh walks away 1-0 with its franchise quarterback clearly still finding his legs, which is a fine problem to have in September when the defense is already bailing him out. Atlanta walks away 0-1 having gotten a monster game out of its best offensive weapon and still losing by a touchdown, which is the tougher problem — the one game everyone expected to be Rush's toughest test looked exactly like that.