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DEL.ICIO.USWelcome to life without Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
East Rutherford, N.J. — The franchise officially showed up without its face Friday night, which is just as well given what the face looks like these days — battered by an indictment and picketers, no longer protected by image-makers and a powerful sports league.
Maybe Michael Vick was watching from his couch in Virginia. Maybe he thought, “They need me. They want me. I’ll get past this. I’ll be back.”
If so, he’s probably deluded. Maybe the Falcons need him, but there’s nothing to indicate they want him. And if they’re even thinking about him, they did a good job concealing it Friday night.
“When you’re out there in the heat of the moment, your adrenaline is flowing, the last thing you think about is somebody who’s not here,” Keith Brooking said. “You’ve got 300-pounders looking you square in the eye, coming downhill on you. I was out there to watch our football team. I wasn’t thinking of anybody else.”
We watched the Falcons play an exhibition game without Vick. That alone wasn’t unusual. A broken leg in one of these a few years back had long since reduced Vick’s August appearances to cameo roles.
We watched a moving-on process shift into the final stages. The Falcons played a game without Vick on the field, on the sideline, and only barely on the roster.
We watched Joey Harrington. It was only three possessions and one touchdown drive in one of the NFL’s super-sized scrimmages. The game will mean nothing statistically when the real season starts Sept. 9. But it wasn’t completely without meaning.
Harrington was asked if it felt like his team.
His response: “It felt like that the first day of training camp. I’m not looking to fill somebody’s shoes. Mike’s a very good player in his own right. But there are things I do well, too. From the moment I got into that huddle the first day of training camp, I knew I could only worry about myself. I had to get myself ready to play for this team.”
The Falcons lost to the New York Jets 31-16. Like it mattered. The NFL’s preseason is about player analysis. Given what the Falcons have gone through this summer and the absence of several starters with injuries, this game was more about who can walk and talk.
It was ugly. It rained. Giants Stadium was two-thirds empty. When coach Bobby Petrino ran onto the field with the team, he probably thought he was here for the Louisville-Rutgers game. Given the circumstances, maybe he wished he were.
Harrington, however, did his best to raise hopes. He completed 6 of 9 passes for 88 yards. He had only one real misfire (two other incompletions being more the result of coverage). He had completions of 22 and 37 yards to set up a 10-yard touchdown run by Jerious Norwood.
You would have thought the Falcons had just a clinched a playoff spot by Harrington’s reaction. He ran around, high-fiving teammates. He ran toward the end zone to greet Norwood. He ran back to the sideline and embraced offensive coordinator Hue Jackson.
“You have to be impressed with him,” general manager Rich McKay said. “I was impressed with Joey, especially since this is somebody who didn’t find out until two days before training camp that he was going into camp as the starter.”
McKay tried to downplay the significance of Vick’s absence. The front office has long since shifted into that hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil mode.
“I kind of viewed the [recent] press conference as that moving-on process,” McKay said during the game. “The way I look at it, you have to deal with who you’ve got. You spend more time worrying about who’s playing than who’s not playing.”
It’s the right thing to say and the right thing to do. But Vick was center stage almost since he was drafted in 2001. This was like staring at an empty TV box, devoid of a screen, circuits and wires.
Get used to it. There is no magic wand that will make all of this go away for Vick. The U.S. government is not going to say, “We give up.” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is not going to say, “All is well.” The Falcons aren’t sending Vick a plane ticket to Minnesota.
This is the franchise now — faceless and possibly buzzless. But they have 16 games to play, and the same can’t be said for Vick.
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