Kroy Biermann’s Eight Seasons with the Atlanta Falcons
A Fifth-Round Pick Who Outlasted First-Rounders
The 2008 NFL Draft’s 154th pick did not make a lot of noise on draft day. Kroy Biermann came out of the University of Montana – FCS football, not a Power Five program – and the Atlanta Falcons took a flyer on him in the fifth round. Jamaal Anderson, a first-round pick from the year before, was already on the roster and theoretically owned the left defensive end spot. By the middle of the 2009 season, Biermann had taken it from him. Anderson never started another game for Atlanta. Biermann started games for eight more years.
That trajectory is harder to explain than it looks. Anderson had the pedigree. Biermann had a two-sack game against San Francisco in Week 5 of 2009 and the coaches made a decision. From that point on, Biermann wasn’t a depth piece – he was a starter on a team that would reach the NFC Championship Game three years later.
From Hardin, Montana to the NFL – the actual backstory
Biermann grew up in Hardin, Montana, a town of roughly 3,500 people. He played football, wrestled, and ran track at Hardin High School. As a wrestler he placed second in the state his junior and senior years, was team captain, and led the squad in takedowns and pins. Football coaches who talked about his leverage and his ability to stay low in his stance weren’t just talking about football instincts – the wrestling showed up in how he played.
At Montana he finished with 32 sacks, second-most in program history at the time, and 45 tackles for loss across 52 career games. His senior season in 2007 he won the Buck Buchanan Award – given annually to the top defensive player in the FCS – becoming the first Grizzly to take the honor. He earned Little All-American honors twice. The résumé was legitimate; it just came from a school most NFL scouts visited once every few years.
Bobby Hauck, Montana’s head coach, ran a disciplined program that produced NFL players more consistently than its conference standing suggested. Colt Anderson, a teammate, said later that Biermann had “an extremely hard work ethic” and made the team better “not only on the field but off.” That’s a generic quote on its face, but Hauck’s players who reached the NFL tended to stick – and Biermann stuck longer than most.
The Early Falcons Years: 2008 and 2009
Biermann’s first professional sack came in Week 13 of his rookie season against the San Diego Chargers. He got Philip Rivers on the ground, added another sack in the season finale against St. Louis, and finished 2008 with 21 tackles. For a fifth-round rookie, that was acceptable. Nothing about it suggested what 2009 would look like.
In the 2009 season opener against Miami, Biermann sacked Chad Pennington twice, forced a fumble, and drew a holding call – all in one game. Then came Week 5 against San Francisco, the two-sack performance that ended Jamaal Anderson’s hold on the starting spot. By November, Biermann was starting at left defensive end and scoring touchdowns. On November 2, 2009, in a Monday Night Football game at New Orleans, he scooped a Drew Brees fumble and returned it five yards for his first NFL score.
Then December 27, 2009, against Buffalo. Kicker Matt Bryant got hurt during the game. The Falcons needed someone to handle kickoffs. Biermann, who hadn’t kicked in an actual game since high school, volunteered. He launched kickoffs of 67, 58, and 54 yards. Nobody asked him to do that. He just did it.
The 2010 Pick-Six and the Season That Solidified His Role
October 10, 2010. The Falcons against Carolina. Jake Delhomme drops back to pass. Biermann tips the ball at the line of scrimmage – to himself – and returns it 41 yards for a touchdown. The play requires a specific combination of quickness, awareness, and dumb luck that can’t be coached. Biermann had the first two in spades, and the third cooperated.
That 2010 season the Falcons went 13-3, won the NFC South, and earned a first-round playoff bye. Biermann wasn’t the star of that defense – that would be defensive tackle Jonathan Babineaux and linebacker Curtis Lofton – but he was a reliable piece of a unit that helped Atlanta reach the divisional round. He finished 2010 with five sacks.
The following two seasons kept him in the Falcons’ rotation. In 2012, the year Atlanta came closest to a Super Bowl, he totaled 52 tackles and four sacks across a season where the Falcons finished 13-3 again and reached the NFC Championship Game. They lost to San Francisco 28-24 after leading by 17 points. Biermann’s line from that postseason run didn’t make headlines – the 28-24 collapse did – but he was on the field and contributing when it mattered.
The 2013 Injury That Almost Ended Things
September 15, 2013. Week 2 of the regular season. Biermann tore a tendon and missed the rest of the year. He was 27 years old and had been a starter on two 13-win teams. Achilles and tendon injuries at that age, for edge rushers who rely on burst off the line, end careers more often than people acknowledge publicly. Biermann wasn’t publicly written off, but a lot of Falcons fans stopped expecting much from him going forward.
They were wrong, though the comeback took a while to fully register. In 2014, new defensive coordinator Mike Nolan installed a 3-4 scheme, which meant Biermann shifted from defensive end to outside linebacker. Different footwork, different read responsibilities, different physical demands. He was 28 and switching positions after a serious injury. He posted 75 tackles and 4.5 sacks – both career highs.
That 2014 season doesn’t come up often enough in discussions of his career. Seventy-five tackles from an outside linebacker who had spent his entire career as a hand-in-the-dirt defensive end, one year after tearing a tendon, is genuinely odd. The numbers don’t fully explain how he did it. He just did.
The Final Season and the Departure
Dan Quinn replaced Mike Nolan before the 2015 season and brought a different defensive philosophy – Seattle’s 4-3 under scheme, heavy on one-gap penetration from the front four. Biermann’s role shrank. He appeared in all 16 games but didn’t start any of them, finishing with 54 tackles and 2.5 sacks in a rotational capacity. At 30, in his eighth season, it was clear the organization was moving in a different direction.
In March 2016 he became a free agent. He visited Buffalo in the spring and signed with the Bills in August, providing depth at outside linebacker after Shaq Lawson went down with a shoulder injury. Rex Ryan confirmed the signing on August 15. By September 3, the Bills released him. His NFL career was over.
His final numbers: 331 tackles, 23.5 sacks, three defensive touchdowns, two interceptions, 114 games played across eight seasons – all but the final weeks in a Falcons uniform. For a fifth-round pick from Montana, that résumé holds up. The Falcoholic, Atlanta’s most-read fan site, noted at his departure that Biermann was “one of the most polarizing Falcons in recent memory” but also “a maximum effort player who gave the Falcons the best years of his career.” Both things are accurate, which is worth sitting with: he was polarizing precisely because he started games where some fans believed a better player should have been. At the same time, the Falcons didn’t develop that better player for eight years running, which isn’t a problem you pin on a fifth-round pick who showed up every Sunday.
What the Stats Actually Show – and What They Don’t
23.5 career sacks across 114 games works out to roughly 0.21 sacks per game. For context, a typical starter considered a solid pass rusher runs somewhere between 0.25 and 0.35 per game over a full career. Biermann was below that range but not dramatically – and he missed significant time to injury in 2013, which drags the average down. His best pass-rushing seasons (five sacks in 2010, four in 2012, 4.5 in 2014) were genuinely useful production. Not Pro Bowl production. Useful.
What the sack number doesn’t capture: his pick-six off Delhomme, his emergency kicking, the fumble return for a touchdown against Brees, or the fact that he played every defensive snap in several seasons where the Falcons lacked the depth to rotate him out regularly. He logged 66 games over the 2010-2013 stretch before the injury and started 22 of them. Special teams contributions don’t show up in the sack column either, and Biermann was a consistent performer there throughout his career.
His three defensive touchdowns over his career – the fumble return, the Delhomme pick-six, and one more – put him in company that most rotational defensive ends never reach. You can go a long career at that position without scoring once.
The Fan Debate That Never Fully Resolved
The honest assessment of the fan debate: Biermann was a symptom more than a cause. Atlanta’s inability to develop a dominant edge rusher for essentially the entire decade from 2007 to 2017 meant that a solid, durable fifth-round pick ended up starting more games than anyone planned. Fans who blamed Biermann for the Falcons’ defensive shortcomings were mostly blaming the wrong person. The team drafted Jamaal Anderson seventh overall in 2007. They brought in Kroy Biermann in the fifth round a year later, and he outplayed the first-rounder within 18 months.
That’s not Biermann’s fault. That’s a scouting and development failure that predated him and continued after he left. Vic Beasley won Defensive Player of the Year in 2016 – his first season without Biermann on the roster – and then posted 5 sacks combined over the next three years. The position didn’t suddenly get fixed.
What’s harder to argue with: the Falcons paid Biermann $9.15 million over three years starting in 2012. That contract was for a player the team expected to be a reliable starter on a Super Bowl contender. He delivered at that level in 2012 and 2014. The 2013 injury ate one of those seasons. By the time his final one-year deal expired in 2015, he’d given Atlanta what the contract asked for.
Life After Football – the Other Half of the Biermann Story
During Season 3 of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Kroy Biermann attended a charity event called Dancing Stars of Atlanta. Kim Zolciak was there. They started dating while he was an active Falcon, married in 2011, and had four children together – KJ, Kash, Kaia, and Kane – in addition to Kim’s two daughters, Brielle and Ariana, whom Kroy adopted. The family appeared on Don’t Be Tardy for eight seasons on Bravo.
The reality television presence made Biermann recognizable to a far larger audience than NFL viewership alone would have provided. It also produced a second layer of public identity that sometimes overshadowed the football career – people who had never watched a Falcons game knew who he was because of the show. After retiring from football, he focused on raising his children. His marriage to Kim ended in divorce proceedings beginning in 2022.
In June 2025, Biermann was inducted into the Montana Pro Football Hall of Fame. The ceremony was held in Billings. His college career numbers at Montana – 32 sacks, 45 tackles for loss, nine forced fumbles across 52 games – hold up as among the best the program has produced. He was the fourth-leading all-time sack leader in the Big Sky Conference’s history of FCS football when he left. The Hall of Fame induction came almost a decade after his NFL career ended, which is about right for a player whose impact took time to evaluate honestly.
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