This is how bad it has gotten: The Falcons cannot win a game even when the opponent hands it to them on a silver tray bearing a card that reads, “From the Browns, courtesy of Brian Hoyer. Enjoy!”
The team that once had no peer at inventing ways to win can’t grasp a simple rule of football: When the other coach needs to preserve time, don’t stop the clock for him.
The team that entered Sunday’s game leading the NFC South proved how empty that station truly is: Even if the Falcons win the world’s lousiest division, it won’t make them a good team.
Because they’re not. They were outplayed badly Sunday by a team that went 4-12 last season and fired its coach and is 7-4. The Falcons went 4-12 in 2013, kept their coach and are 4-7. They’re 0-7 against teams not from the NFC South, which is unbelievable — until you watch these Falcons contrive to lose against anybody halfway decent, and then it’s not only believable but understandable.
The Falcons have become a horribly coached team. (They’re not all that talented, either, but let’s deal with one cosmic failure at a time.) Cleveland’s Mike Pettine coached an awful game Sunday — misusing his timeouts at the end of the first half, watching his quarterback throw the three worst interceptions ever clustered — and deserved to leave the Georgia Dome a loser for such largesse. But no. Mike Smith trumped him.
The same Falcons who stopped the clock twice for trailing Detroit inside the final two minutes in London last month — first with an offensive penalty, then with an incompletion — did it again. Smith called timeout before a third-and-2 play with 55 seconds remaining and his team facing a long but makeable-by-Matt-Bryant-if-not-by-everybody field goal to take the lead.
“We wanted to get the best play we could on third down,” Smith said. “We were right on the edge.”
Then: “It (a 53-yarder) was outside the range we had set before the game.”
Really? So 53 yards was too far for Bryant this given Sunday? After he’d converted from 51 yards to force overtime against the Saints in this same Dome and from 52 yards to win it? Was the wind blowing harder indoors this day? Had he lost three feet off his fastball since Sept. 7?
About the play the Falcons tried: It was awful. Matt Ryan, who had one of his worst days, underthrew Devin Hester deep. Yes, Devin Hester, the Falcons’ No. 4 receiver. Yes, deep — when three yards would have sufficed. The timeout stopped the clock at 0:55. The incompletion halted it at 0:49. Bryant put the Falcons ahead at 0:44. But the Browns had all their timeouts.
Said Smith: “They would have used their timeout (before third-and-2) if we hadn’t.”
Exactly. At that moment, with a kicker who has booted so many game-winners in this building, you make the Browns call two timeouts — before third-and-2 and after, when you’ve done the sane thing and run the ball and not risked a clock-stopping incompletion. Even if the time the Browns had remaining was the same (44 seconds), the dynamics wouldn’t have been. Hoyer ended the two previous series with jaw-dropping interceptions. Was he apt to take his team 50 yards with one timeout?
Sure enough, the Browns needed all three timeouts and a clock-killing spike to align Billy Cundiff for the 37-yard winner. Yet again, the Falcons had aided and abetted the enemy. For the second time in four weeks, they’d lost a game that was simpler to win.
At least in London, the Falcons could take solace in the knowledge that they’d outplayed the Lions. Here they were lucky not to have trailed by 20 points early and by 16 late. And they knew it.
Someone began a question to receiver Roddy White thusly: When the other team throws two interceptions in the final five minutes, do you …
White jumped in. “Feel like you’re going to win? Yeah. I thought the game was ours after (Desmond Trufant’s end-zone) interception. I thought we should have pushed the tempo. We kind of sat back.”
After Trufant’s interception, the trailing Falcons made one first down and punted. Amazingly, Hoyer threw the ball to them again. With 2:45, they took the ball at their 45 needing a field goal to win. They got the field goal and lost.
“We only got 15 yards,” White said, underclubbing by five. “We should have gotten three or four first downs and run out the clock and kicked the field goal. The defense will say, ‘We need to stop them,’ but no, that’s on us for not finishing.”
Well, yes. The Falcons’ defense is the NFL’s worst, though it kept them in the game Sunday despite yielding 475 yards. The offense was supposed to be great, but it was mostly overpowered by the league’s 22nd-ranked defense. A game the Falcons used to steal was botched. And this coach, who spent five years putting his men in position to win such games, presided over a second unthinkable loss in 28 days.
Time for a new coach? Afraid so. New players, too.
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