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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > June > 28
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Predictions spot Falcons 1-15 position
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’ve all assumed the season ahead won’t be kind — both ESPN and Sports Illustrated have tabbed the Falcons the NFL’s worst team — but there’s a difference between unkind and utterly wretched. That’s why the Sporting News Pro Football yearbook arrives with such a thud. This august publication picks the Falcons to go 1-15.
I believe I can speak for everyone in Atlanta when I say, “Ouch, babe.”
In the history of the NFL, no team has lost more than 15 games in a season. (The league adopted a 16-game schedule in 1978.) Only eight teams have ever finished 1-15, and none of those, surprisingly enough, was based here. As lousy as the Falcons have historically been, they’ve never been 1-15. Not in the worst of their start-up days (1-12-1 in Season 2). Not at the nadir of Marion Campbell’s second tour (3-13 in 1989). Not in June Jones’ farewell (3-13 in 1996).
Heck, they weren’t 1-15 last season, in which they deployed three different starting quarterbacks (none of whom was Michael Vick) and worked under two different head coaches. They wound up 4-12, which was pretty awful but is four times better than 1-15.
So think about that. Remember how bad 2007 was, and then imagine 2008 yielding one, two, three more losses. Bartender, make that a double!
The good news, if there can be anything good about such a dire outlook, is that the absolute worst doesn’t usually arrive as predicted. (If it did, my mom would have been Danny Sheridan.) Remember how Georgia Tech fans were afraid their team mightn’t win a game in 2003? The Jackets actually went 7-5.
More good news: Mike Smith doesn’t read Sporting News.
“We kind of draw our own expectations,” said Smith, the Falcons’ new coach. “Ours are a lot higher.”
Asked if you wouldn’t have to be truly horrid to lose 15 times in a salary-capped league, Smith said: “There could be some extenuating circumstances. But this is such a competitive league year-in and year-out. The best thing is that we’ve got 16 opportunities.”
And that’s the point. As excruciatingly extenuating as circumstances were, the 2007 Falcons won four games and lost five more by a touchdown or less. The belief here is that Smith’s back-to-basics approach — run the ball, stop the run — will make for a slew of 17-14 games, and surely the Falcons can win more than once. Can’t they?
Smith again: “We have our expectations of what we are as a football team, and we want to control how we’re going to prepare, how we’re going to study, how we’re going to condition … We want to be taskmasters. We want to focus on the task at hand.”
As goals go, that beats the heck out of saying, “Let’s prove those guys wrong by winning at least two!”
The belief here is that these Falcons will win more than one (or two). Of their 16 games, only four will be against teams that finished 2007 with winning records. Smith’s defense should keep matters close enough often enough for this team to go 5-11, and who would have thought that picking a team to lose 11 times would qualify someone as a raving optimist?
From 1-15, though, there’s a lot of room on the upside and next to none on the bottom. “There’s only one record that’s worse,” Smith said, and let’s not venture there.
No NFL team has ever gone 0-16. Please don’t let this be the first.
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