This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > December > 29
Monday, December 29, 2008
Trip to Arizona a blessing for blessed Falcons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Flowery Branch — Mike Smith began his postgame walk to the locker room Sunday believing his team would have a week off and then a home playoff game. By the time he reached his destination he’d learned otherwise. And was the Falcons coach disappointed?
“It would have been nice to have a home game with our home-field advantage and the bye week,” Smith said Monday. “That’s definitely an advantage.”
But again we see that some higher power seems to have taken a liking to these bold Birds. Because their reward for finishing second in the NFC South is one of the sweetest consolation prizes in the history of consolation. They get to play Arizona, and here’s what Vegas thinks of the Cardinals: They’re home-field playoff underdogs to the team that only four months ago was the consensus choice as the NFL’s worst.
Sixteen games have taught us these Falcons are much closer to being the league’s best than its worst, and there seems no reason for the happy story to end Saturday in Glendale. Arizona was 6-0 against the NFL’s worst division, 3-7 against real teams. It was 1-4 against playoff qualifiers — the Falcons were 3-2 — and enters the postseason having lost four of six.
If you have to play on an opponent’s field in January, you pray Arizona is the opponent. For all the worry about the Cardinals’ passing — Kurt Warner and three 1,000-yard receivers — they have nothing else. They’ve yielded 101 more points than the Falcons, and Arizona’s running game is the league’s worst. And a team that can’t run is a team that shouldn’t be playing in January.
Smitty being Smitty, he made Arizona sound like the 1966 Packers in his weekly media briefing — “very potent,” he called the Cardinals — but in a private conversation afterward he made it clear that he likes his team’s chances in the month ahead. He was the defensive line coach for the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, a wild-card team that won the Super Bowl, and when a visitor asked if he sees similarities in these Falcons, he said this: “I’m very confident we will execute and go out and play well.”
For someone so cautious, that came close to sounding like Joe Willie Namath the week of Super Bowl III. (OK, maybe not that close.) But Smith has reasons to be cheerful: His team has passed every big test, and it seems as, er, potent as any team in the playoff grid.
The Falcons have been a week-by-week surprise to those of us on the periphery, but not to the men inside the complex at 4400 Falcon Parkway. Indeed, Smith said he learned all he needed to know about his team not in those 11 seconds against Chicago or the overtime against Tampa Bay, but way back in Week 2.
The Falcons trailed the Bucs 17-3 in Tampa. Matt Ryan had thrown two early interceptions and was getting hammered by a defense that lives to hammer young quarterbacks. And then you looked up in the fourth quarter and it was 17-6 and the Falcons had a first-and-goal and Ryan was rattled no more.
“You talk about turning points,” Smith said. “That was a turning point. Our young quarterback completed 8 of 9 passes, and we showed we could handle a surge on the road. The outcome [a 24-9 loss] wasn’t what we wanted, but you felt very proud about what we were able to accomplish.”
The Falcons would win four of their next seven road games, and not since that first half on Sept. 14 have they seemed overwhelmed anywhere. They will not be overwhelmed Saturday in Glendale. They’ve beaten better teams in tougher places.
They’ll beat the Cardinals and move on to the next task.
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Bradley’s Buzz: Right on Ryan, wrong on all else
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Scoreboard gets a new home
The final Bradley’s Buzz of 2008 seems an appropriate place for the Accountability Scoreboard, which annually totals my personal hits and misses. Or, in the case of the year almost complete, my personal hit — note the singular — and misses.
To be frank, I had a lousy prognosticating year. Many of you know this already, but here are the specifics in inglorious detail.
Braves on the road to greatness
That was the headline on a silly little something I wrote on Memorial Day. I predicted the local baseball team would be in first place by the Fourth of July and would win the NL East going away. In a career of spectacular whiffs, I’d rank this among the top three.
As ever, I had my reasons. I’d liked the Braves in the spring, and they’d had held together through a run of early injuries and seemed to be getting healthy. As ever, cold reality intervened. Four significant players — Glavine, Smoltz, Diaz and Kotsay — went on the disabled list within two weeks of the ill-fated column. Was it my fault the infirm Braves blew the ol’ law of averages to smithereens?
Only five days earlier, I’d pronounced the Mets dead, which they weren’t quite yet. The New Yorkers again made a run at the division title, again losing out on the regular season’s final day. So my diagnosis wasn’t exactly wrong — just four months premature.
Georgia en route to a championship
I’ve already done a mea culpa on this topic, but I’m sure Florida fans won’t ever get tired of a rerun of my recap. Here goes:
I picked Georgia to win the BCS title. I did this once in May and twice more — here and again here — in July. I called the Bulldogs the class of the SEC in both September and October.
Truth to tell, I was wrong about nearly everything regarding college football. (Call me the new Beano Cook.) Tech did not go 7-5. Tech did not lose to Georgia. Paul Johnson’s offense did, however, work as predicted.
Tim Tebow did not win another Heisman. Matthew Stafford did not outplay Tebow. Auburn did not win the SEC West. Wake Forest did not win the ACC Atlantic. Texas did not win the Big 12 (though it was still, I contend, the best team in that league). Southern Cal did beat Ohio State but will not play in the BCS title game. Clemson was, as I surmised, wildly overrated. And Virginia Tech did, as I guessed, win the ACC Coastal.
Picking three of the Final Four
Ordinarily I’d be thrilled to have batted .750 in my Final Four Fiasco, but anyone who picked all four No. 1 seeds batted 1.000. One such person lives under this roof. She was 10 at the time. She beat her dumb ol’ dad, who’s five times 10 and then some.
Oh, yeah. I also picked UCLA to win it all. Wrong on that, too.
Underclubbing on the Falcons
What gripes me is that I was really trying to be optimistic. (And believe me, optimism from me requires a concerted effort.) I picked the Falcons to go 5-11. They finished 11-5. How bad is it when you miss the final record by six whole games? So bad that only one thing serves to mitigate my error, and here it is.
Thank goodness for Matty Ice!
I advocated drafting him. When the Falcons did, I applauded their sagacity. When they decided to make him their starter, I endorsed that, too.
And here I’d like to thank Mr. Ryan for saving me from having a worse year than Wall Street. And I’d also like to thank y’all for reading and responding. Even if I’m not much of a seer, I’d like to think this goofy little blog has become a vibrant place for one and all. Even Gator fans.
And one to grow on
It’s an Accountability Scoreboard tradition to end with a final bold forecast. Last year’s involved Georgia and the BCS title, wouldn’t you know, and was utterly incorrect. This year’s involves the Falcons, and here it is:
The final score of the NFC title game: Falcons 21, Giants 20.
Matty, don’t fail me now.
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