For the record, the Falcons and the Buccaneers both went 4-12 last season. For the record, they split their head-to-head meetings. For the record, these teams were pitiable peers in 2013.
For the record, they’re peers no more.
The Falcons have already won half as many games as they did last season, and we’re not yet done with September. If Thursday’s display was any measure, Tampa Bay mightn’t win four games the rest of this century. The Falcons are on the way to being good again; these Bucs might be the worst in franchise history, and Tampa Bay, lest we forget, started 0-26 in its expansion infancy.
This was the sort of game the Falcons have often saved for prime time, with one difference: This time they weren’t the ones being embarrassed. They scored 28 points in the first 15:07, leaving them on track to finish with 111, which would have been half as many as Georgia Tech mustered against Cumberland in 1916. (The thought occurs that Cumberland of 1916 and Tampa Bay of 2014 might make for a spirited contest.)
The Falcons needed 177 seconds to score a touchdown. The Bucs needed 23 minutes just to make a first down. By then the hosts had outgained the visitors 250 yards to 21 and outscored them 35-0. Tampa Bay turned the ball over three times in 5 1/2 minutes, the first of those coming on a play when the Falcons first gave the ball away. (Devin Hester, from whom more would be heard, snatched it back.)
The Falcons were getting points from names great (Julio Jones and Hester) and small (Kemal Ishamel, who returned an interception 23 yards to make it 21-0). Matt Ryan was flinging and his many receivers were snagging and Steven Jackson was rumbling and the worst-in-the-NFL defense — stop the presses! — was defending. On its third try, a movable object found its resistible force.
About Hester: The Chicago import scored on the first snap of the second quarter, taking a reverse around the left side. That made it 28-0 and you got the feeling the Falcons had begun to show off. Turned out you were right. Seven minutes later, Hester caught a Michael Koenen punt and flashed past all Buccaneers, poor Koenen last and least, and did the Deion Sanders hand-behind-helmet thing as he high-stepped into the end zone.
This drew a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct, but it was altogether fitting. The return touchdown was Hester’s 20th, putting him one ahead of Prime Time, and the new Falcon set his record not just in prime time but in the building Deion once dubbed “my house.”
The Falcons didn’t score the rest of the half, but they did, miracle of miracles, manage an actual sack of an actual NFL quarterback. Indeed, they managed two! (OK, so one was against Josh McCown, who spent the half looking not at all like an actual NFL quarterback, but still.) Jonathan Massaquoi got the team’s first of 2014; Corey Peters got the second in his first game of 2014, and Peters could prove to be a big man on this underwhelming D.
The Falcons would lead 56-0 after three quarters, thereby putting themselves within hailing distance of Chicago’s record 73-0 obliteration of Washington in the 1940 NFL title game. They wouldn’t score again, not that anyone cared. The Bucs got a touchdown — after going for it on fourth-and-1 at midfield — to draw within 56-6 but somehow neglected to try a two-point conversion.
Ten months ago, the Falcons lost at Tampa Bay in the worst performance of an awful season. After three games, the 2014 Falcons have taken two major strides on the road to rectifying, as general manager Thomas Dimitroff would have it. Sunday’s loss in Cincinnati was a dud, but the Week 1 overtime victory over the hated Saints was the stirring tone-setter a bounceback season needs, and this utter domination of a division opponent served as another indication that dismal days of 2013 have been put to rest.
When last the Falcons met Tampa Bay, they yielded 41 points and lost by 10. This time they yielded 14 points and won by 42. For the record, that’s progress.
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