The Atlanta Falcons are an excellent, exciting football team. That sentence shouldn’t read like a news item to anyone: the Falcons just won the NFC title after back-to-back blowouts in the playoffs, and scored 71 more points than any other NFL team during the regular season. But based on the lack of early buzz around Super Bowl LI, a lot of football fans simply don’t care.
To be completely honest, my personal enthusiasm to even write this column is tempered by the concern that no one outside the state of Georgia will click on it. An article about Tom Brady and the Patriots, or the offseason questions facing the Steelers and Packers? Not a ton of fresh ground there, but it would get some views because all of those teams are NFL cornerstones with huge fanbases. Whereas the Falcons are very much … the Falcons, for lack of a better term. A team that might show up on your team’s schedule every couple of years and, other than that, have always been mostly irrelevant nationally. So writing a thousand-plus words on Atlanta’s football team in late January? We’re in unfamiliar territory here. It feels like a risk, same as admitting that these Falcons are fun and legitimate contenders.
The sense that NFL fans don’t know what to make of the Falcons yet isn’t just the uninformed opinion of some northeastern media person. There’s actual data that says so. Falcons-Packers drew a lower TV rating than Patriots-Steelers and was the lowest-rated early day conference title game since 2013. The secondary market for Super Bowl ticket sales slowed even more when the Falcons made the big game over the Packers, a slide that began when the Cowboys were eliminated. And the points spread in Vegas has already shifted a half-point from its opening to minus-three Patriots thanks to all the New England money coming in, book-ending an NFL season that saw more people wager on the Cleveland Browns to win the Super Bowl than the Falcons back in the preseason. The Cleveland Browns.
Falcons diehards support their team no less than hardcore fans of the Cowboys, Packers, Steelers or Patriots. A falcon tattoo hurts just as much as one of the Dallas star, does it not? But the rest of us, the people responsible for nationwide TV ratings, undoubtedly have our perceptions of the franchise colored by its middling history. In 51 seasons, beginning in 1966, Atlanta has made the playoffs just 13 times and only did it in consecutive seasons twice: 2010 and 2011 and then again in 2012. Every time the Falcons dip a toe into the waters of consistent contention, they quickly return back to also-ran status. Yet for all the losing, the Falcons never managed to be bad enough to join the likes of the Browns and Jets as national punchlines. It’s a franchise that hasn’t stood out in any way, existing in a part of the country where collegiate sports get as much or more attention and publicity than the pro game. The Falcons are the kid you went to school with for 12 years and have no recollection of existing.
Atlanta’s lone Super Bowl trip, following a 14-2 regular season in 1998, sticks out in history more as cautionary tale than accomplishment. The night before the game, star safety Eugene Robinson – hours after receiving the Bart Starr award for character and community service – was arrested in Miami by an undercover officer for soliciting a prostitute. The Falcons went on to get dominated in the game by John Elway and the Broncos, 34-19, but the outcome probably had less to do with the Robinson incident than the fact that Atlanta were attempting to win a Super Bowl with Chris Chandler as their starting quarterback. Per franchise tradition, the Falcons collapsed the next year to 5-11 and then 4-12 a season later.
Michael Vick got them back to the conference title game in 2004, but that was the high-water mark of his time in Atlanta and par for the course with Falcons fortune. Vick didn’t reach his potential. Brett Favre did, but only after Atlanta traded him to Green Bay. Deion Sanders had his greatest successes outside Atlanta. And Jamal Anderson’s career got derailed by injury. So when Ryan, the No3 overall pick in the 2008 draft, reached the playoffs in four of his first five seasons only to then miss them three years in a row on the heels of the Falcons blowing a 17-0 home lead to the 49ers in the NFC title game, the natural assumption outside of Atlanta was that Ryan was going to be the face of yet another disappointing chapter in Falcons history. An assumption that was only bolstered last year when the Falcons started 6-1 and then nosedived to an 8-8 finish.
NFL (@NFL)JULIO JONES IS A BEAST.
January 22, 2017
73 yards all the way to the house! 😱 #GBvsATL #NFLPlayoffs https://t.co/Iau1EnDgVJ
This year’s 4-1 start followed by two losses felt like just more of the same. Then the Falcons got to 6-3, only to slide to 7-5. No one was willing to get duped again. The Falcons surely would be forever boring, just like Ryan has also seemed off the field. (Watch his two cameos bobbing his head to the beat in this NFL Play 60 commercial and try not to cringe with embarrassment for him.)
But if the Falcons are that high school classmate you never noticed, they’ve transformed into the stunner that will wow everyone at the reunion. No one has played better than Ryan over the past two months, throwing 18 TDs and no interceptions during Atlanta’s six-game win streak. The Falcons are most definitely not showing up at their second Super Bowl with Chris Chandler 2.0. Julio Jones would unanimously be declared the best receiver in football if he had yellow hair and played in New York or did Facebook Live broadcasts from the locker room of a franchise with six Super Bowl titles. And the Atlanta defense has rounded into form as well, successfully pressuring Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers on the road to the Super Bowl – the exact strategy that works against Tom Brady.
Fifteen years ago, the Patriots were the boring, mid-rate NFL franchise with a poor following trying to prove themselves to the world in the Super Bowl. Now look at them. So don’t sleep on the Falcons, even if you literally dozed off during their games in years past.
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