Two names, two nights
The Atlanta Falcons announced today that John Abraham and Bill Fralic will join the franchise Ring of Honor this season. They become the 15th and 16th members.
Abraham takes the Week 5 Sunday night game against the Baltimore Ravens on October 11. Fralic will be honoured posthumously at the Week 16 meeting with Tampa Bay, a flex game whose date the league has yet to fix.
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Sacks and snaps
Abraham spent seven seasons in Atlanta between 2006 and 2012 and produced 68.5 sacks in that stretch. Across 15 NFL seasons with the New York Jets, the Falcons and Arizona, he reached 133.5. He made five Pro Bowls and two first-team All-Pro squads. He is 48 now.
Fralic arrived as the second overall pick in the 1985 draft and started 115 of the 116 games he played for the club through 1992. The right guard collected four Pro Bowl selections and two first-team All-Pro nods across nine NFL seasons, the last of them in Detroit in 1993. He died in 2018 at 56 after a battle with cancer.
A wall that fills slowly
Atlanta has never rushed this list. Sixteen names across a franchise history that started in 1966 works out at roughly one every four seasons, which puts a certain weight on each announcement.
Abraham reached Atlanta in 2006 through a draft-day trade with the Jets and handed a struggling defence a genuine edge rusher from his first snap. Fralic anchored the Atlanta line through the Chris Miller years, holding down the right side of an offence that rarely had much else going for it. Neither man played in a Super Bowl for the Falcons. Both stayed long enough to define a decade of the club.
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