DeMarcco Hellams competing for starting spot with Atlanta Falcons

During training camp with the Atlanta Falcons last year, safety DeMarcco Hellams had to earn a spot on the NFL team’s regular-season roster as a rookie. When the former Alabama defensive end reports for his second training camp on July 24, Hellams will be looking to earn a spot in the Falcons’ starting lineup.

“Last year, I was just getting a feel for what the league had to offer, getting my start on special teams, a little bit of defense toward the end of the year,” Hellams told Sports Illustrated’s Falcon Report. “I feel like I hit all the learning curve the first year, so this year I feel like I’m a bigger, stronger, faster player.”

Hellams led Alabama in tackles during the 2022 season, but he was not selected in the 2023 NFL Draft until the 224th overall pick.

Hellams was selected in the seventh round and in Atlanta’s first 10 games, he played 64 defensive snaps and 144 special teams plays. But after the Falcons’ bye week, Hellams played 305 defensive snaps and started four times at safety in Atlanta’s next six games. He missed the final game of the season with a concussion.

Hellams’ increased playing time has meant less playing time for Richie Grant, a 2021 second-round pick who started every game in 2022 and 15 in 2023. Both players return this year to compete for starts with Jessie Bates III at the back end of the Falcons’ defense.

“Marcco has done a really good job,” Bates said during Atlanta’s offseason program. “I’ve always told Marcco he has no problem playing football — seeing it and feeling it. But the biggest thing I’ve seen is he understands the playbook and is able to say, ‘Oh, this is the same thing we did last year,’ or he’s able to just run routes and things like that.

“I think Marcco wants to hit people right now, but he can’t do it. But I can see the progress and growth he’s making as a player and as a person, so it’s really cool to see.”

While Hellams finished 14th in defensive snaps for Atlanta last season, his 25 solo tackles tied him for eighth on the team, and he made 40 total stops.

“Watching the tape from last year, you see a physical player,” said Jimmy Lake, the Falcons’ new defensive coordinator. “A guy who likes to tackle and is really one of the pillars of how we want to play. We want to play fast, we want to play loose, we want to play physical and he plays physical. He fits that bill, for sure.”

Atlanta didn’t use any of its eight draft picks on defensive backs in April. The Falcons have allowed the eighth-fewest passing yards in the NFL through the 2023 season, though Atlanta’s 24-to-8 touchdown-to-interception ratio is tied for fourth-worst in the league.

After going 7-10 and missing the playoffs for the sixth straight season in 2023, the Falcons hired Raheem Morris as their head coach in January. The defensive backs coach with Atlanta in 2015 and defensive coordinator and interim head coach in 2020 during his six seasons with the Falcons, Morris had worked the previous three seasons as the defensive coordinator with the Los Angeles Rams.

“We didn’t draft any second-line players, we didn’t draft any second-line players,” Hellams said. “That’s something I really looked at, guys looked at and said, ‘OK, if that’s what (Morris) did and what Lake — and (GM) Terry (Fontenot) did, too — then obviously that shows what they think of us. They think the guys in this room can do it, and all the guys in this room think the same thing, so it wasn’t a surprise that nobody got drafted in the DB room. It was just another look at each other like, ‘OK, so we know what we said before, as in, ‘We’ve got everything we’ve got, we’ve got everything we need.’”

After beginning training camp in Flowery Branch, Ga., later this month, the Falcons will begin their three-game preseason schedule against the Miami Dolphins on Aug. 9 and open their regular season against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sept. 8.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at@AMarkG1.