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DEL.ICIO.USCamp quiet and Falcons will take it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Flowery Branch — One year to the day after the street out front looked like Tiananmen Square, and a plane circled the practice field dragging a banner reading, “New team name? Dog-killers,” and Bobby Petrino mumbled something about honor, commitment and, “Whoa, look at the time! Gotta go,” the Falcons opened training camp again Saturday.
Hello? Where’d everybody go?
If a team’s season is like a book, the Falcons did it all wrong last season. They didn’t build to anything. Everything blew up in chapter one. The rest of the book read like Arthur Blank wandering around trashed acreage, carrying a shoulder sack and one of those pointy sticks used to pick up garbage.
By comparison, Saturday was like watching Yanni and wearing bunny slippers.
No protesters. No pickets. No dogs, no aircraft, no media circus. It might have seemed slightly muted for opening day of an NFL training camp. But the Falcons will take it.
Embrace the boredom. Embrace the solitude. Embrace the football coach, Mike Smith, who spent the morning encouraging players, smiling at fans, answering questions in a media session and, gosh, actually seemed like he wanted to be here.
Blank, the owner, embraced it all. He doesn’t know how good (or bad) his team will be. He continues to desperately schmooze sponsors and hawk season tickets. (How about allowing kids with their Falcon goody bags to stand on the field during practice?) But the focus was on more mundane matters than felony charges and dead pitbulls.
“Like I told a guy last night, when he wanted to talk about No. 7 again, I’m done with that,” Blank said. “I’m into the now and the future. I’m done with the past. Our focus is where we are and where we’re going. We closed that door a long time ago.”
Note the subtlety. Blank didn’t even mention Michael Vick by name.
OK, maybe not so subtle.
This training camp isn’t merely devoid of protagonists, it’s short on name recognition. General manager Thomas Dimitroff orchestrated a roster flush the likes of which this franchise has never seen. Dunn, Crumpler, Hall, Coleman, Gandy.
Even the recent high draft pick, Jimmy Williams, wasn’t near a Falcon receiver in practice Saturday — but then he never was.
There are only a few veterans around to tell the others where the bathrooms are.
“It’s amazing,” said 10th-year center Todd McClure. “I’ve got all the team pictures through the years. I was looking at them and from our ‘04 team, I think it’s just me, [Keith] Brooking, [Kynan] and [Todd] Weiner. I guess it’s just the nature of the beast.”
The beast last year mutated beyond recognition. Change was going to be a mandate. But the fact the Falcons have already hit bottom in terms of being a punch line doesn’t mean they’re going to be any better. They won four games last season. One national publication has them winning one this year.
Brooking said, “I’m excited about this team and the guys we’ve got here.” That doesn’t really count, because the Titantic could be going down and Brooking would say, “I’m excited to have this chance to swim.”
But the freshness, the newness, of it all at least creates some intrigue.
“Two years after the Super Bowl win in Baltimore, we came to camp with 13 players from that team,” said Smith, the Ravens’ former assistant. “So I’ve been in situations where young guys had the opportunity to compete.
“This camp is going to bring some clarity to our football team. But we’re not going to know the answers in two weeks. It’s probably going to be four weeks before we know that.”
If then.
“Of course, as a coach, you’d like to have your roster set,” he said. “Some clubs probably have 45 of their 53-man roster set already. Our situation is much different. You can make that a little unsettling.”
But this kind of unsettling, they’ll take. A coach talking about open competition? It’s relative therapy.
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