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Sunday, September 7, 2008
The Falcons have met expectations
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It began as it usually does in the Georgia Dome. The players from the visiting team — in this case, Detroit — were announced and the gathering crowd booed. What began to develop thereafter was so astonishing I’m not sure where to begin. There’s a story that has gone the rounds for years about a famous journalist, just home from covering a war, and had just watched a football game that would go down in history. Then sat hovering over his typewriter, groping for words and begging inspiration, whereupon he leaped from his chair, and cried, “This is too big for me. I can’t write it,” and collapsed in the press box.
I’ll refrain from collapsing, but I’m on the verge. What those of us encapsulated in the Georgia Dome this September afternoon have seen is too big for the normal human being to translate into words. We slosh through the drudge that has been the fate of the Falcons these last few seasons and we find ourselves stumbling and bumbling through one catastrophic nightmare after another. Would it ever end? Would anybody ever get it right? Should this be Arthur Blank’s life sentence?
This Sunday afternoon the sun came to rest its rays on this bedraggled NFL franchise, and while no guarantees come with it, of all the Falcons moments that I have experienced, none other can match it. No Sunday in Minnesota on the way to the Super Bowl, nor a frigid afternoon in Green Bay, where the storied Packers were beaten on their own grass. Those were but wisps of a fleecy brush with history compared to this opening game of a new season and a change in direction under a fresh command.
It began this way: Michael Turner hit left tackle for nine yards. Then again for a first down. Then Matt Ryan, the rookie quarterback from Boston College, threw his first official professional pass. By the time the play was done, Michael Jenkins had reeled in the ball and scored, a play covering 62 yards, and Ryan followed gleefully down field pointing skyward. By the time the first quarter had ended, the Falcons had scored twice more and taken a 21-point lead.
Was this fate’s bitter tease? Would there be a flashback to failures of previous Falcons? This city had seen so much losing on autumn Sundays that life in the NFL seemed a condemnation to mediocrity. (And I refrain here for falling into the roiling pit of misery delivered to us by Michael Vick, Bobby Petrino and others who shall remain nameless and hopefully forgotten.)
Even when the Lions began a resurgence in the second quarter, there were those of us who began to feel a pitiable nervousness. Tell us this is not another fateful tease. Blessedly, it developed that it wasn’t.
The story had been: Could Turner take the pressure off Ryan? Was Ryan ready to stand the heat of the NFL? Well, it may have been only for a day, but if it was, it was one helluva act. Turner had played in the shadow of LaDanian Tomlinson in San Diego, out of Northern Illinois, a school in the shadow of the Big Ten. There had been questions about Ryan, his arm strength, his high draft number and the Falcons’ huge investment in him. As it stands, it is not so much the football intangibles hovering other them, but the judgment of the new Falcon high command, namely Thomas Dimitroff and Mike Smith, both plucked from the back row of other NFL organizations.
Vindication becomes them. Dimitroff is not one to attract attention, stood along the sideline before the game, dressed in a light colored suit, his electrified hair in place. Plain Mike Smith is just that, a solid man having his first fling under lights, only his snow-capped noggin distinguishing him. Neither conjures up the image of attention seekers. Both have been relatively out of sight while this team was being put together. This is just the first mile of a long road ahead, and nothing is guaranteed. At least you can say that on this one day they have met the prediction of The Sporting News. The Falcons would win one game, TSN said. They’ve done that. The score was 34-21. Stand by for further developments.
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