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Home > Terence Moore > Archives > 2008 > December > 28
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Falcons’ detailed approach results in the “p” word
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So you wish to know the anatomy of this ongoing Falcons miracle? Well, it begins with the mentality of their coaches. For instance: They’ve never discussed wins and losses publicly or privately. They’ve also refused to utter the “p” word associated with playoffs until recently.
It’s called throwing a fresh spin on that tired cliche about taking each week, game and second at a time. More specifically, it’s called focus. These Falcons coaches continue to have it, and they’ve demanded as much from their players.
“As a result, nobody wants to let the other guy down on this team, and it’s been like that all season,” said defensive end John Abraham, reflecting on the Falcons’ 11-5 finish to the regular season after surviving the St. Louis Rams 31-27 on Sunday at the Georgia Dome. Added Abraham, looking around a surprisingly businesslike home locker room, “It’s never been ‘I’ first with this team. It’s always been ‘we’ first, and whether we win or lose, we’ve learned to depend on each other.”
We’re back to that anatomy. For the longest time, those Falcons coaches were mum on their postseason expectations — if any — for a ridiculously young bunch that featured nearly half of its roster with players owning three years of pro experience or less. That silence went from Mike Smith’s arrival as a rookie NFL head guy in January, and then through organized training activities, and then through training camp, and then through most of the regular season.
Then their lips loosened on that “p” word just before their playoff-clenching game last week in Minnesota.
That said, Smith and his assistant coaches have mentioned everything else freely and loudly from the start. They’ve been little things, but they’ve become big things along the Falcons’ way to streaking into the new year as a wild-card team with a chance to shock reality even more.
And here’s the funny thing about those little things: They are so ingrained in most of the Falcons players these days that they just do them. As for discussing them, that’s another matter. Those little things are so simple that no Falcons player that I surveyed on Sunday remembered them all. Instead, most Falcons players remembered enough of them to explain why their team is sprinkled with pixie dust.
“From the start, (Smith’s) attitude was more along the lines of that, if you take care of those little things, the wins would come,” said offensive tackle Todd Weiner. “He just had a lot of specific goals that involved the way that we were going to play. It was about coming to work every day and working hard. He set goals that said we were going to be a physical team and that we were going to come out and be taskmasters.”
That’s sort of what Jerious Norwood recalled, but not quite. According to Norwood, “(Smith) said he wanted us to go out every game and play our type of football by imposing our will on opponents and just to have fun. He also wanted us to do our jobs in a detailed way.”
Wide receiver Michael Jenkins recited a bunch of other things. “(Smith) told us that one of our goals was to try to win every game at home,” said Jenkins, with the Falcons followed orders by finishing 7-1 at the Georgia Dome. “Then, going through the season, he broke it down to four quarters. If you do what you need to do as a team each quarter, then you have a good shot of having a good record at the end of the year. And the last goal was to win three in a row for us.”
They just won three in a row.
As for Smith’s playoff goal for the Falcons, he says, “Why not us?”
Why not?
Then again, that’s a big thing.
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