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Sun. Jan 16, 2005

1 Down, 1 To Go

Saturday night, the Falcons had the “prime time” 8:15pm slot, and a chance to show a national TV audience if they were “for real” or not. A mere two hours later, with 11:39 still left in the game, the announcer said, “if this was a fight, they’d stop it.”

The Falcons coach last year, Dan Reeves, used to run what some called the “smash mouth” offense, based on the traditional concept that you have to be able to control the line and run the ball at will. It was a very “old school” offense, but hard to argue with the basic principle.

Saturday night, 17 of the 22 starters on the Falcons team played under Reeves last year. On offense especially, it is largely the same guys. But it’s not the same “old school” offense. Or the same “team,” in the depth that word can have with a group of 50 athletes. No, this is not Dan Reeves’ Oldsmobile.

Yet they ran. And ran. And ran. The first time they faced third down in the game, needing two yards, Vick ripped the Rams for 47. That set the tone. Michael Vick, Warrick Dunn, and TJ Duckett ran for a total of 327 yards, averaging nearly 8.4 yards per carry. Meanwhile, they held the Rams rushing combo of Faulk/Jackson to a mere 62 yards, or 3.9 yards per carry.

That’s smash mouth football, as it should be.

Three touchdowns on the ground, and two more by air. Plus a field goal and a safety, for variety. And I think Vick showed why his stats as a passer aren’t up there with Peyton Manning’s. Because his team doesn’t need for them to be. He only threw 16 passes, but he completed 75% of them, and two of them were TD’s. When your team is running all over the other guys, ripping them for 8 yards a crack, you don’t need to pass as much.

If you look at the team stats for the game, they are surprisingly even, other than the inversion of rushing and passing yards. But they hardly tell the story. The Rams failed to stop the Falcons offense at all (i.e., force a punt) until the very end of the third quarter, and by then they were down by 21 points. By the end, they may have achieved “stat parity,” but when TJ Duckett headed for the goal line one last time with two minutes left, the Rams defense hardly moved to stop him. They were simply beat. They had literally been run over.

The day before the game, I wrote in a comment, “Yes, Michael Vick is the most explosive player in the league, and when all is clicking, the Falcons can beat any team in the league. It can be a truly joyful thing to watch, trust me. But they also are a very young and fragile creation, with many stress points that could easily fracture. And I can’t predict which team we’ll see Saturday night.”

Well, it was indeed joyful for me tonight (though not for others, and maybe not for me, next weekend). I laughed and giggled through much of the game, as I often do when I watch Michael Vick. And that is behavior I have never exhibited in my decades of watching this game.

Cheer? Yell? Drop my jaw in silent wonder? Sure, I’ve been inspired to do all of those things, by many great performances.

But Michael Vick makes me laugh, like no athlete ever has. I don’t recall the marvelous performance of any athlete ever making me … laugh. I can’t explain it. But I’m hoping that next weekend, I bust a gut.

Later: A few quotes from around the web, and one from today’s AJC column from Mark Bradley (and thus, entirely unlinkable behind their paid firewall)

“The Falcons ran with such jaw dropping ease that a guy in the press box actually took his finger and counted to see if the Rams were fielding the full complement of defenders.” [Mark Bradley]

“Whether it was Warrick Dunn slipping in here or there, or Vick with the bootleg, we worked against it all week,” defensive end Leonard Little said. “But we just couldn’t stop them. Ain’t no science to it. We just couldn’t stop it.” [source]

“I don’t think I’ve been part of a loss like this,” defensive end Bryce Fisher said. “We played like we had handcuffs on.” [source]

“We ran the ball pretty good tonight,” noted Falcons rookie head coach Jim Mora. Uh-huh. And Van Gogh was pretty adept with a paint brush. [source]

This was, even with the early offensive action by the Rams and quarterback Marc Bulger, a butt-kicking of the highest order. [source]

“It just makes [a defense] lose confidence,” said Falcons defensive end Patrick Kerney, who has been on the other end of a running game that can’t be stopped. “It’s like somebody pokes a hole in your heart and the blood just keeps running out. It’s awful.” [source]