Don’t hand me the injury excuse. Nothing excuses getting beat like this by a team that didn’t win its first game until Monday night. Nothing excuses the slop the Atlanta Falcons, who were 10 yards from a Super Bowl this calendar year, tried to pass off as professional football here Sunday.
And the truly galling part was that the Falcons were relatively healthy. Sean Weatherspon played. Steven Jackson played. Roddy White played. Tony Gonzalez played. Still they lost to Tampa Bay, one of the two teams they’d beaten, 41-28 after trailing by 32 points with 16 minutes remaining.
Midway through the third quarter, a man sitting in the press box said he’d never seen the Falcons look so bad. That man was David Lewis, a fierce linebacker on the famous worst-to-first Bucs of 1979. During the game he made a dozen salient observations, the most damning being: “The Falcons don’t look like they know what they want to do.”
Lewis pointed to the Falcons’ first possession, when Jackson gained 22 yards on two carries. They then arrayed themselves in the shotgun and watched Matt Ryan get sacked on consecutive snaps by Gerald McCoy, a dual swoop that quashed the drive and induced the Falcons to insert Joe Hawley at center and move Peter Konz to guard in place of Garrett Reynolds.
Come the third quarter, the Falcons faced fourth-and-1 at the Tampa Bay 33. Jackson, who weighs 240 pounds, set himself in the backfield. Instead Ryan threw to Roddy White over the middle. The pass was batted down by safety Dashon Goldson. The Bucs scored to make it 31-6. Then they blocked a punt and scored again, and by then it was a clear that the 13-3 team of 2012 had been a figment of Arthur Blank’s imagination. How else to explain this across-the-board collapse?
Speaking of Blank: He said afterward that his organization has “to reassess.” He also said: “We love our head coach and love our general manager. They have to look at everything candidly and honestly and critically.”
Fine. But weren’t coach Mike Smith and GM Thomas Dimitroff the architects of this 2-8 team? Does Blank feel they’re the men to make the requisite corrections?
“Absolutely I do,” he said. “They’ve earned it over the past five years. They’re proven leaders, proven by success.”
Then: “The mountain of their work speaks volumes. … It’s a matter of understanding what’s different.”
What’s different about the 2013 Falcons? Only everything. The defense, never great, is terrible. The running game is the league’s worst. Without Julio Jones, the passing game has been rendered ordinary. Ryan had an interception returned for a touchdown and was imprecise throughout. Both Gonzalez and White were flagged for procedure penalties. White lost a fumble.
Jackson, imported as a tailback upgrade, has had no effect. (He gained 41 yards Sunday.) Bobby Rainey, who began the season as the Bucs’ fourth-string tailback, bashed the Falcons for 163 yards. So don’t talk to me about injuries, OK?
The Bucs have dumped a starting quarterback and fought down a mutiny and endured a staph infection, and they were much the better team Sunday. This would suggest the Falcons could stand some staff defections, which is another way of saying that the coaching stinks, too.
Said Smith: “The way we played was unacceptable. The way we coached was unacceptable.”
Smith has been saying this for a while now. (The Falcons have lost their past four games by an aggregate 74 points.) Why should anyone think that this sub-mediocrity is a passing phase?
“Because this group of men has won a lot of games,” Smith said. “This group of coaches has won a lot of games. Right now we’re not playing good football.”
Do tell. But where and when will it end? If Tampa Bay, lately seen as a sinking ship, can line up with a new quarterback and dominate, what does that say for the dominated Falcons?
To echo Lewis’ point, it says that the Falcons don’t know where to turn. They made a terrible bet on a reconfigured offensive line, and that whiff has revealed the team that compiled the NFC’s best record from 2008 through 2012 as a house of cards. With the exception of the Colts when Peyton Manning was lost to surgery, has any good team ever gone this bad this fast?
“It’s just the way of the NFL,” cornerback Asante Samuel said. “There’s always going to be adversity. We’ve got to figure out a way out of it.”
They’ve been figuring for nearly three months. As yet, no exits are apparent. Folks, this isn’t getting better. It’s getting worse by the week.
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