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Mon. Dec 29, 2008

Falcons Explode Expectations

At the beginning of 2008, the Atlanta Falcons had no general manager, no head coach, and no incumbent starting quarterback. They had little more than the Number Three pick in the April 2008 draft, and one huge toxic cloud, generated by perhaps the worst season in professional sports history. They were the Union Carbide of the NFL, the Bhopal Falcons.

Before the season began, The Sporting News predicted these Foul Falcons would win one game out of sixteen. As it turns out, that wouldn’t have even gotten them the first pick in the 2009 draft, thanks to the woe-and-sixteen Detroit Lions.

Instead, the Falcons clinched a spot in the playoffs. Which is not a sentence anyone thought they would be writing this year.

It is impossible to overemphasize the horrible state this team found itself in as a result of the 2007 season. It inspired me to write last year, “When this team was born in 1966, it was swaddled in bad karma, and has dragged it around like some nasty security blanket ever since.”

It all began when the team’s umpteen million dollar franchise quarterback turned out to be a Lying Dog Murdering Team Betraying Anti Role Model. We also learned (gradually) that the new head coach brought in to build a shiny offense around a now jailed felon was in no way prepared to handle the NFL, or even simply complete one season.

It was both “a testosterone-filled soap opera, a Man Drama of epic proportions,” and a very very very very very long and horrible season.

Then in week 13 of that long horrible season, the new head coach quit. Phoned in his decision to the team owner (after lying to his face for days), left a “Dear John” note on the locker room wall for the players (which they inscribed with one word, “Coward”), and made a cloud of smoke to the head coaching job at the University of Arkansas.

I said at the time, Losers Quit. Today, Falcon’s safety Lawyer Milloy says, “That was the day we started to heal.”

This season, I hear many of the players have engaged in a little football schadenfreude, with a locker room cheer each week that Arkansas lost during this season. And they had ample opportunity, since the Hog’s record under Petrino this year was 5 wins, 7 losses (after going 6-6 in 2007 and 7-5 in 2006).

Meanwhile, Mike Vick went bankrupt sitting in prison, says ESPN, while the AJC published Records show how Vick burned through fortune. And on a more heart warming note, Sports Illustrated offers a gallery of photos on What Happened to Vick’s Dogs.

The word is that Vick may be moved to a halfway house in January to serve the final six months of his sentence, and then in July of 2009, he could be released. It’s doubtful he will be in anything like “football shape,” but there could be some desperate team that signs him into training camp in August.

There was a time that I worried that “desperate team” would be the Falcons, who, technically, still hold the NFL rights to Vick. Today, I have no idea how they will work out that contract technicality, but I am certain the Falcons do not want or need him.

Why? Because of a rookie, the Falcon’s first pick in the 2008 draft, Matt Ryan. What has he accomplished this year? I think the best answer to that is that he has made Falcons fans ask the question, “Michael who?” The painful sting of potential torched (and jailed) has been completely erased by Matty Ice.

Yeah, I thought Matty Ice was a pretty silly nickname the first time I heard it, too. But after watching Matt Ryan play through an entire season, it is a perfectly descriptive name. While most worried he would be a typical skittish indecisive rookie QB, he has shown the poise and cool of a seven year pro.

I’m a fan, not an experienced expert. So listen to someone who is, Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young: “Just wait. Dan Marino had success as a rookie, but he had a Dolphins team that already was a playoff contender. Ben Roethlisberger had success as a rookie, but his Steelers team also was a playoff contender already. This guy was drafted by the worst team in football, and he’s like a bolt of lightning.”

But before we coronate Matt Ryan, let’s focus on that part about “the worst team in football.” As Mark Bradley notes, “Four months ago these Falcons were 150-1 to win the Super Bowl, the longest shot on the board.”

For seemingly good reasons. Four months ago, the Falcons had a rookie General Manager (Thomas Dimitroff), who’d hired a rookie head coach (Mike Smith), who installed a new offense and drafted a rookie quarterback to run it, and a rookie left tackle to protect his blind side. Of the 22 players who were starters at the end of 2007, only 11 started in 2008. Half of the players on the 2008 team have less than 3 years experience in the pros.

The one win prediction by The Sporting News seemed a bit harsh, but, well, understandable. A prediction of eleven wins and a playoff berth would have been met with, well, lithium and electroshock therapy.

But that is indeed where the Falcons are today. After the toxic disaster of 2007, a 4-12 season where the head coach abandoned ship with three games left, they find themselves in the playoffs. Only two teams had a worse record than theirs last year. This year, only five teams have a better record than their 11-5.

Frankly, it’s been like watching a different team. For the past three years, if you were lucky enough to play the Falcons during the last quarter of the season, you’d likely find them curled up in a fetal position near their own goal line muttering “don’t hit us again, please.”

This year, they don’t quit. They have played to the finish in every game, and only got beaten badly once. They are a pleasure to watch, even when they lose, as they have a palpable chemistry. They usually start quick and win early, but they’ve also come from behind to win on the final play. Their bread and butter is a straight ahead running game featuring their major free agent acquisition, Michael Turner. But their offensive coordinator is also nicknamed “Professor Gadget,” and will at times line the team up with no quarterback and three running backs in the backfield awaiting a direct snap.

In many ways, they are the wildcard in this playoff stack.

I’m not going to predict how they will do in the playoffs, except that they won’t roll over for anybody. But I will predict this: next year, they will break what has been (so far) a 43 year hex. One that motivated me to write, “I have now come to accept, when I die, even if it’s fifty years from now, the hex will outlive me.”

I no longer believe that. Next year the Falcons will win again. They will have two winning seasons back to back, something that has never been done in franchise history.

And, to me, that is even more preposterous than the idea they were going to the playoffs this year. Four decades more preposterous.