Mike Smith: 'Atlanta Falcons showed improvement'

Mike Smith has said that the Atlanta Falcons showed improvement during their second game of the pre-season.

The NFC South side lost 27-23 to the Baltimore Ravens following their defeat to the Cincinnati Bengals last week.

The head coach told reporters: "Our goal tonight was to improve in the areas that we felt like we needed to improve from week one. I thought that we did that.

"There were some things in the Cincinnati game that we wanted to make sure that we addressed. We wanted to improve our run game, I thought we did a nice job of running the ball in the first half. We did a good job with the pass protection as well.

"We're a team that prides itself on not being penalised, and we had way too many penalties in the ball game. I think we had nine penalties, a lot of procedural penalties that need to get corrected."

The Falcons will play the Tennessee Titans last week.