The season began with the Falcons insisting what happened in 2013 wasn’t really them, and they had a case. From 2008 through 2012, they’d been 56-24, second-best to New England over that span. In 2013 they were 4-12, a regression coach Mike Smith termed “an anomaly.”
Today they’re 2-6. They had a winning percentage of .250 last season; they have it again. They’re 6-18 since falling 10 yards shy of the Super Bowl. There’s nothing anomalous about this. They’ve become a ragingly bad team.
Worse — and not much is worse than being ragingly bad — is that they’re inventing ways to lose. For five years it worked the other way: They’d tread water for 55 minutes and then sort things out at the end. Now they make the absolute wrong play at the absolute wrong time. Think of the sack on fourth-and-1 to seal the loss in the Meadowlands. Think of the Bears’ 74-yard completion to Alshon Jeffery two plays after the Falcons had pulled even at 13. Think of everything that happened in the final 20 minutes at Wembley on Sunday.
A 59-yard touchdown on third-and-25. Matt Ryan’s throw-to-nobody-wearing-red interception. The unthinkable holding call when trying to run out the clock. The Julio Jones drop that saved the Lions 35 more seconds. All of which led to the Falcons matching the franchise record for biggest blown lead, which for this often star-crossed team is saying something.
The easy answer is to say that the players are terrible and the coaches are dolts, but that’s too pat by half. Most of these coaches were in place when the 2012 Falcons were 13-3 and 10 yards from you know what. Many of these players were, too. The blend was fine that season. (Fine until Navorro Bowman interfered with Roddy White and got away with it.) Alas, nothing has worked since.
And now an organization that was for five years something close to a model of efficiency has reverted to addled Falcons mode. Smith looks shattered after every loss, of which there have been five in succession. General manager Thomas Dimitroff gets defensive when his roster-building is called into question, which it is on an hourly basis. Mike Nolan has overstayed his welcome as defensive coordinator, not that he had much of a honeymoon.
Even the Falcons’ two best players — Dimitroff’s shining lights — are unraveling. Ryan had a great first half and a nothing second half against the Giants, and the separation was more pronounced Sunday. Jones makes plays but leaves others unmade, though sometimes the Falcons forget to get him the ball. (They’ve also done that with Antone Smith, the one smiley face on this bleak season.)
The offensive line would be amusing if it weren’t so sad. With all the upfront injuries, playing O-line for this team is akin to playing drums for Spinal Tap. The defense, never good under the career defensive man Smith, is worse than ever. After seven years of building, there’s really not much there.
Meanwhile, everyone stands around and casts glances at Arthur Blank, who Sunday resembled an English lord — he wore a three-piece glen-plaid suit — whose garden party had been spoiled by an onset of squirrels and squalls. He tried not to say anything but couldn’t help himself. “You’re up 21-0. There’s no way you lose that game — just no way. There’s nothing else I can say. You know and I know it.”
Everyone who works at 4400 Falcon Parkway lives in fear of The Man Who Sends The Red Emails. Blank put his front office on notice in January when he said he felt the Falcons lacked toughness, and an offseason push was made toward that end. Speaking Wednesday at the Falcons’ Watford hotel, Smith offered what was, by Smitty standards, a frank admission: “Right now (the toughness upgrade) has not translated into the wins that we had anticipated.”
Nothing has. After the breathless overtime opening win over the Saints, it was apparent the Falcons would have to score 30 points to win. They’ve broken 30 once since — against Tampa Bay — and won only then. In their past four losses, they’d managed 20 points (none in the fourth quarter) against the Giants, 13 against the Bears (ditto), seven against the Ravens (those near game’s end) and 21 against the Lions (all in the first half). Even the best part of this team isn’t nearly what it needs to be.
Which is the point: There really isn’t a best part. There’s just a team that has lost three of every four games for more than a year now. There’s a coach who went bold in New York and helped lose that game and who went timid at the end of the first half here and helped douse his team’s fire. There’s a front office living in fear of what Blank will do and when he’ll do it.
Had such reversals come in Smith’s third and fourth seasons, as opposed to the sixth and seventh, there might be a way back. Not now, I fear. He has been speaking the same words to these same guys for too many years, and you could be an orator of Cicero’s ilk and the speeches would have gone stale.
The players, always a pragmatic bunch, surely sense what’s happening. The team is broken, and the present regime seems incapable of fixing it. They know it. You know it. I know it. Arthur Blank knows it, too.
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