Madrid as good a place as any for Falcons’ recovery

MADRID — Greetings from Spain!

What better place for a Falcons home game?

The Falcons arrived Wednesday morning from Atlanta ahead of their game against Cincinnati on Sunday, missionaries in the noble cause of generating more billions for the NFL.

Upon landing, they bused straight to the training complex of world soccer power Real Madrid, where they went through a brief workout to loosen up from their trans-Atlantic flight.

There waiting for them was a sizable contingent of Spanish and European media, perhaps 50. At first glance, sports media members here are more bearded and less rumpled than their American counterparts and also speak better English.

This was the best part, though. As we waited in an auditorium for the Falcons to take the practice field and to be escorted out to watch the beginning of the workout, word got out that breakfast and coffee were being served in an adjacent room. It triggered a stampede in which no breakfast sandwich was safe.

The bowl of fruit, though, had little reason for fear.

It was as though we had been transported to SEC Media Days.

It was the sort of cultural connection that we all long for when we travel. No matter the continent, if you cut any sportswriter open — we strongly discourage this, by the way — do we not all have cholesterol-caked arteries?

As for the Falcons, in this matchup that counts as a home game, the more pertinent question becomes: Can they pull themselves together from the soggy thrashing they absorbed from Tampa Bay this past Sunday while they also deal with jet lag and a drastic change of routine?

For insight into this question, it might be worthwhile to revisit how the Falcons fared when they have previously encountered extraordinary circumstances.

For instance, playing in a downpour in Tampa.

As we wait for your facial tic to subside, though, consider this counterpoint, courtesy of coach Kevin Stefanski after the Falcons’ training session.

“These are great trips for us as a football team because, I always use the term, we’re under one roof,” he said. “You share some meals together, you spend a little bit more time together than when you’re at home and we’re all kind of going our different ways at the end of the evening.”

Wide receiver Jahan Dotson painted his own vision of the week in Madrid, dipping his brush in a jar of optimism.

“I feel like we have a cool opportunity here to kind of flip the script,” he said. “Traveling two days after our game on Sunday kind of gets your mind off of it a little bit.”

Whether you put stock in either rationale, there’s also this: The Falcons have a way of defying logical outcomes.

Given the weather conditions, the game against Tampa Bay should have gone to the team with the better running game and run defense. And you would think that would be the team whose running back, in Stefanski’s colorful response to a query about Bijan Robinson, was “made in a laboratory” and whose run defense had been ranked fourth in the NFL.

But it was the Buccaneers who mashed out city blocks’ worth of rushing yards and contained the lab-engineered Robinson.

Both the run game and run defense, thought to be team pillars, are trending downward. A week after a career high point, quarterback Michael Penix Jr. was at his worst against Tampa Bay.