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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > December > 15
Monday, December 15, 2008
Falcons’ success makes a happy season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last month Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli, once Dimitroff’s boss in New England, drove to Athens to watch Georgia practice. En route the rookie general manager was still lamenting the narrow home loss to Denver three days earlier, whereupon his friend and counterpart cut him off.
“You’re 6-4,” Pioli said. “When the season started, wouldn’t you have taken 6-4?”
Even process-driven people get caught up in the rhythm of a football season. It’s tough to take a macro view amid weekly doses of micro, and here’s where we all need to consider what it is we’re witnessing. This isn’t quite the finest of the Falcons’ 43 seasons, but it’s surely the happiest.
“This is just out of the blue,” said Steve Bartkowski, the quarterback of the 12-4 team of 1980.
“This has got to be one of the most amazing seasons in Falcons history,” said Jessie Tuggle, the defensive fulcrum of the 1998 Super Bowl team.
“Winning heals everything,” said Leeman Bennett, who coached the Falcons during three of their eight playoff runs and who, like Bartkowski and Tuggle, still lives in Atlanta. And then: “You don’t even think about last year.”
Well, yes and no. We cannot fully appreciate this sunny season without first recalling its wretched predecessor. Listen as Tuggle narrates:
“Everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong. There was the trouble with Michael Vick, and the coach leaves in the middle of the night — the Falcons were the laughingstock of the NFL. They were losing their fan base, and people were looking at Mr. Blank as if certain individuals had taken advantage of him. Then they hire Mike Smith, who’s a name people don’t know — not a [Bill] Parcells — and then they have quarterback issues and the question of who to draft in the first round. It took a while for fans to absorb all that because Matt Ryan wasn’t the athlete — not the quarterback, but the athlete — Michael Vick was.”
Yet here the Falcons stand, 53 weeks after Vick was sentenced to prison and Bobby Petrino fled for the Ozarks, winners of nine games with a chance to finish 11-5. Only two teams in franchise annals — the 1980 bunch and the 1998 Dirty Birds — have bettered that, and neither faced such skepticism.
Bartkowski on 1980: “We had added a component here and there, and we’d been to the playoffs [in 1978.] It wasn’t necessarily a pipe dream. We had a lot of weapons on offense.”
Tuggle on 1998: “Our expectations were pretty high. We’d ended 1997 on a good note [winning six of the final eight games]. … But it wasn’t until the 12th or 13th week that people began to realize, ‘This team is pretty good.’ “
That team landed in the Super Bowl. Might this one? “When you get into the playoffs, anything can happen,” Tuggle said. “Why couldn’t this team do it?”
This team, as led by this quarterback, of whom Bartkowski said: “He’s light years ahead of the learning curve. Nobody has ever come into this game and done what Matt Ryan has done.”
Even if this season doesn’t last into January, even if it ends in a letdown, these Falcons have already accomplished what figured to require years of work: They’ve cleaned the slate and begun anew.
Tuggle: “There’s something about winning games that pulls a team together, and this team has pulled the city back together after Michael Vick.”
Bartkowski: “It’s been tough being a Falcons fan through the years … [but] this is a better place to live when they’re doing well. Atlanta so wants to be a football town.”
And now it can act like one. It sure as heck has a football team.
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