It's time to take the Atlanta Falcons seriously
Ladies and gentlemen, your Super Bowl champion Atlanta Falcons.
Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Off-key, like a presidential candidate singing Christmas carols. And yet, in the increasingly you-never-know NFL, the 4-1 Falcons are fast approaching the point where we have to concede that, yes, maybe that other red-and-black team from the state of Georgia might just be decent.
The Falcons’ current status is as follows: ranked first in passing, first in total yards, first in scoring, seventh in rushing. Their four wins include consecutive convincing victories over last year’s Super Bowl teams, just the third time that’s ever been done. They’re warming the hearts of fantasy owners everywhere. They’re already projected at a better than 80 percent chance to make the playoffs.
And yet, for every champion team that loves to play the hack “nobody-believed-in-us” card, we at last have a potential champion that, indeed, no one believes in.
Part of that’s due to the longstanding bias in favor of certain teams’ ability to achieve greatness in the NFL. Past results shape future perception. Some teams, like the Cowboys, Steelers and Packers, need only to win two games in a row to start pulses fluttering. (The Patriots only need to complete two passes in a row.) Other teams have much higher mountains of doubt to climb; the Jaguars, for instance, could win three straight Lombardi trophies and we’d probably still question if they could hang with the Colts in their division.
The Falcons fit squarely into the win-first-believe-later category, and Atlanta’s fans are the canary in this particular coal mine. Falcons faithful have seen all this before. They remember Eugene Robinson picking up a Man of the Year award, then picking up an undercover cop the night before the team’s only Super Bowl. They remember seeing Tony Gonzalez wide open in the end zone, waiting to catch the touchdown that would have put Atlanta into Super Bowl XLVII, waiting for a pass that would never come. They remember how last year’s 5-0 start plummeted off a cliff to an 8-8 finish. (That’s to say nothing of the residual scar tissue Atlanta fans carry from other sports, whether it’s the one-championship-in-15-years Braves or the University of Georgia’s Hail Mary loss to Tennessee last month.)
So you can forgive Atlanta fans for giving this latest run the side-eye. They’re used to the expectations, used to the hype that blankets the Falcons the way buy-your-new-stadium-seats-now commercials currently blanket Atlanta airwaves. We’ve been down this road before, they say. Why’s this going to be any different?
“I think we are mentally tougher,” quarterback Matt Ryan said after Sunday’s victory over Denver. “We are a more resilient group, for sure, and you learn from that. Obviously we started fast last year, and it didn’t go our way in the second half of the season. But I think what you learn, especially for young guys, is that the difference between wins and losses are a handful of plays, and we have to be on the right end.”
That’s a passive construction of what’s been a very active Atlanta game plan. The Falcons dismantled both the Panthers and the Broncos using two dissimilar game plans. They attacked Carolina’s wobbly secondary with an aerial assault so vicious — 503 yards passing for Ryan, 300 yards receiving for Jones — that it cost Carolina cornerback Bené Benwikere his job.
Then they straight punched Denver’s defensive line in the mouth with a two-running-back offense. Tevin Coleman ran for 132 yards, while Devonta Freeman ran for 88, and neither seemed particularly concerned about the defense that brought a Super Bowl trophy to Denver last year.
Moreover, Atlanta once again has the weapons to carry out these kinds of tactics. Back during that run to the NFC championship, Ryan could throw to Jones, Gonzalez and Roddy White, but the running game was serviceable at best. Now, the team’s rolling two separate bowling balls out of the backfield at once. Jones still has the ability to take over a game, as whoever holds him in your fantasy league can testify, but now he’s got a surprisingly competent complement of receivers. And then there’s Coleman, who ranks second in both receiving and rushing, and leads the team with five touchdowns.
Plus, Ryan has the time to plot out offensive strategy. For most of the past three seasons, Ryan has had less time than it takes to read this sentence to get off a pass. But the Falcons’ newly stable offensive line, stabilized by offseason acquisition Alex Mack at center, is allowing Ryan the luxury of assessing a defense rather than backing up three steps, slinging the ball and offering up a prayer.
Long derided as the “Is Pepsi OK?” of quarterbacks, Ryan in truth has the skills and vision to be one of the game’s elite. What he doesn’t possess is the Aaron Rodgers-esque ability to reshape an entire game all by himself; Ryan is much more like the artist who requires all of his paints and brushes to be in order before creating a masterpiece. But Ryan has a full complement of receivers, a running attack that can both protect him and diffuse an opposing rush, and a defense that can give him the luxury of playing from ahead.
Look, it’s OK not to believe in the Falcons. Heck, doubting them is probably a good idea, given their track record. And if there’s a point of concern, it’s the defense. Atlanta is currently relying on a Steve Spurrier-esque run-up-the-score strategy to win games, basically expecting the offense’s mastery to outrun the defense’s lapses.
The Falcons rank 26th in both passing yards and total yards surrendered, and they’ve already let teams hang 33 (Carolina), 32 (New Orleans) and 28 (Oakland) on them. But the defense finally showed up against Denver. Granted, the Broncos were running out a quarterback in his first career start, but even so, the Falcons pushed around Denver, led by defensive end Vic Beasley’s four sacks. If Atlanta can get that kind of effort out of its defense more than once every five games, this is going to be a lethal unit.
Looking down the road, the schedule sets up well for the Falcons, who are playing their best football in the season’s toughest stretch. If they can pick up a win against either Seattle on the road this week or Green Bay at home — plus a victory over the Chargers, who by then will likely just curl into a fetal position when the fourth quarter starts.
No one this side of Arthur Blank would have pegged this weekend’s Falcons-Seahawks game as one of the season’s first pivotal moments, but here we are. If the Falcons manage to win this one, they won’t be sneaking up on anyone anymore; they’ll be at center stage. And then it’ll be up to Atlanta to keep from falling off that stage.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
