Archive for the ‘Falcons/NFL’ Category

Eli celebrates the greatest month a 9-7 team ever had. (AP photo)

Every season ends with music blaring, confetti falling, a trophy awarded. It’s “One Shining Moment,” a pinnacle attained, a champion crowned. But more and more, we’re seeing trophies taken by teams that aren’t quite the epitome of excellence. We’ve entered the era of the accidental champ.

We consider the most recent winners in the six major American sports:

Connecticut, the 2010-11 NCAA basketball titlist: The Huskies finished in the bottom half of the Big East, which numbers 16 teams. They were 9-9 in regular-season conference play and entered the Big East tournament as the ninth seed. They won five games in that event, six in the NCAA tournament. They won more than half as many games (11) in the two postseason events as in the regular season (21).

Boston Bruins, the 2010-11 NHL titlist: They finished the regular season with 103 points, seventh-most in the league. They had the fewest points of any of the six …

Continue reading From Cardinals to Giants, it’s the era of the accidental champ »

This is basically what pro football has become: One guy slinging the ball. (AP photo)

Always before, old-school football would rise up in the Super Bowl and save the day for us codgers. The 1983 Washington Redskins set an NFL record with 541 points in the regular season, but managed only nine against the Raiders of Lester Hayes and Michael Haynes. The first installment of Buffalo’s hurry-up offense was grounded by the New York Giants, after which Bill Parcells exulted, “Power football, baby!” The St. Louis Rams and their Greatest Show on Turf were undone by Bill Belichick’s Patriots.

And now you’re saying: “The Super Bowl is Sunday. It still could happen.”

And here’s where this old-schooler concedes defeat and says: It won’t.

This champion will have the lowest-rated defense of any Super Bowl winner ever. The New England Patriots, still Belichick’s team, ranked 31st in the 32-team NFL. And the Giants, who are seen as the more traditional of the teams still standings, ranked …

Continue reading Can the Super Bowl really be Super if nobody plays defense? »

Peyton Manning, shown here not playing. (AP photo)

The Super Bowl dwarfs all else in North American sports, but the Super Bowl will be only the second-biggest story in this year’s host city. Of greater interest in Indianapolis is what’s happening with Peyton Manning, the only NFL player who’s a team unto himself.

Everybody knew Peyton Manning was a great player, but just how great was revealed only when, for the first time since he was drafted out of Tennessee in 1998, he wasn’t able to play. For 13 seasons and through 227 consecutive starts, Manning made the Colts a viable concern. Then he had offseason neck surgery and was so slow to heal that he missed not just a start but a season.

With Manning, the Colts had made the playoffs 11 times in 12 seasons. Without him, they did well to win two games. They were the NFL equivalent of the Cleveland Cavaliers after LeBron James took his talents elsewhere, and here we thought that in football no one man could mean half that much. For …

Continue reading Peyton Manning: A weird and ugly ending is at hand in Indy »

"Extra, extra! Read all about it! The team that beat the Falcons wins NFC!" (AP photo)

Three times in four seasons, the Falcons of Mike Smith and Matt Ryan have been eliminated by the eventual NFC champ. This isn’t, however, to suggest they keep being undone by an unlucky draw. In each case, the Falcons entered with the better regular-season record. When it happens once or even twice, we can shrug and say, “Them’s the breaks.” When it happens three times since 2008, we pluck at common threads. And we find …

• In each case, the Falcons held a lead. They’d rallied from a 14-3 deficit to lead 17-14 at the half in Phoenix on Jan. 3, 2009, but the Arizona Cardinals — who’d lost four of their final six regular-season games to finish 9-7 — scored the next 16 points. The game turned on the second play of the second half, when Darnell Dockett thwarted Ryan’s handoff to Michael Turner. Antrell Rolle grabbed the ball and returned it for a touchdown.

Against Green Bay in the Georgia Dome …

Continue reading So why haven’t these Falcons gotten closer to a Super Bowl? »

The man in the white shirt has had a busy New Year. (AJC photo by Curtis Compton)

Flowery Branch – Even as we grouse about recent results, we need to step back and admire the broader view. If, in the dark days of January 2008 — Michael Vick in jail, Bobby Petrino in Arkansas, the franchise in tatters — someone had said, “The Falcons’ next staff will win 67.2 percent of its games over the next four years and make the playoffs three times,” we’d have taken it in a Meadowlands minute.

But that was then, and now is rather different. And now is why the doings of January 2012 have been essential to the continued growth of a team described by Mike Nolan, its new defensive coordinator, as “very close” to its “ultimate goal.”

The staff Mike Smith assembled in 2008 served the Falcons well, but it had reached the point of diminishing returns. The 10-6 season just completed was the first of past four that could be construed as a reversal. Had Mike Mularkey and Brian VanGorder and Paul …

Continue reading The Falcons had to change to move forward, and they have »

Paul Boudreau had early success here, but less lately. (AJC photo by Brant Sanderlin)

Remember Mike Smith, the dullard who’d rather hang out with his old coaching pals than do something like, oh, maybe win a Super Bowl? Turns out he’s not so wild about his old pals that he’ll let that bond stand in the way of progress.

Smitty the alleged dullard — so alleged for having hired Dirk Koetter, with whom he worked a year in Jacksonville, as offensive coordinator — just fired Paul Boudreau, the offensive line coach whose success in 2008 helped get the whole Smith-as-Falcons-coach operation off the ground. And then he turned around and hired Mike Nolan as defensive coordinator.

Pretty instructive day, I’d say. First the Falcons make a move they needed to make. (As noted, GM Thomas Dimitroff wasn’t pleased that his smallish line couldn’t produce the push required to make it on fourth-and-inches twice against the Giants.) The Boudreau Method — coaching up smallish-but-bullish O-linemen …

Continue reading Fire Boudreau, hire Nolan: A productive day for the Falcons »

Slogan suggestion: His name is Dirk, and his responsiblity he won't shirk. (AP photo)

Flowery Branch – No, it doesn’t look so good: An offense that couldn’t manage a point in losing its playoff game has been handed to a man whose most recent unit finished last in the NFL. Why not hire Darrell Royal and have him install the Wishbone?

But here’s where we take a deep breath and say: Dirk Koetter isn’t as bad as all that. For what the Atlanta Falcons need in the year 2012, he’ll be better than Mike Mularkey. (Though you know that Jacksonville fans are thinking what we around here were wondering when the Jaguars made Mularkey their head coach: Is that team nuts?) And here’s where we must take a bunny-hop of faith.

At Falcons HQ Monday, Mike Smith stuck his head in the hallway where the media relations staff has its offices and was spotted by this correspondent, who posed three questions.

Is Koetter the guy he wanted? “Yes,” Smith said.

Is the head coach comfortable that Koetter is …

Continue reading In hiring Koetter, Mike Smith deserves the benefit of the doubt »

Double M leaves! Touchdown! (AJC photo by Curtis Compton)

The Jacksonville Jaguars, for reasons unclear, have hired Mike Mularkey as head coach. That means the Atlanta Falcons lucked out. They’ve been spared having to fire him as offensive coordinator.

The belief here was that Double M, as he’s known, wasn’t going to be retained, but that’s not to say the decision would have been painless. The Falcons won a lot of (regular-season) games with Mularkey overseeing the offense, and it’s never easy to break a winning pattern even if you know the pattern needs breaking.

Moot point now, though. Mularkey is gone, same as defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder. The Falcons have two key hires to make this offseason, and the offensive position is surely the more important. In the end, offensive failings undid this talented aggregation. The Falcons need to find a man who could make these glittering pieces more of a whole.

Mike Martz is a name that keeps surfacing, but I might look first to …

Continue reading Those lucky Falcons: Mike Mularkey goes to Jacksonville »

"Five! Five! That's how many yards we're going to gain on this play!" (AP photo)

Updated to reflect the news that defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder is leaving for Auburn.

After the Falcons thrashed Tampa Bay to close the regular season, a buoyant Michael Turner cast an eye toward the postseason and told reporters, “We just have to go out and play Falcons football.”

Question: What now constitutes “Falcons football”?

Power running? (Sometimes, but not all the time.) The hurry-up offense? (Sometimes, but not all the time.) Strict attention to detail? (In previous seasons, but not this.) The capacity to extract the best from a cadre of gifted players? (Not even close.)

The 2011 Falcons got caught in between — they weren’t the grind-it-out bunch of old,  but they weren’t the squadron of turbojets Thomas Dimitroff envisioned when he made his bold move to draft Julio Jones. The rookie receiver did his bit, but it was as if the Falcons never knew what to make of him. Sometimes …

Continue reading VanGorder leaves, with more Falcons changes to come? »

Julio Jones was supposed to make a difference. He made none Sunday. (AP photo)

East Rutherford, N.J. – In April they traded five draft picks to grab one wide receiver because they felt they needed to be more “explosive” to reach the Super Bowl. On Sunday the Atlanta Falcons saw that grand design blow up in their corporate face.

Their sleek offense ran into the NFL’s 27th-ranked defense and managed nary a point. Think about that. In a league where nobody can stop anybody, the Falcons’ offense was outscored by its own defense.

A year ago it was possible to write off the Green Bay loss as a case of the No. 1 seed being undone by a hot quarterback. These Falcons lost to a 9-7 opponent that didn’t do much itself until it was clear the visiting team could do nothing.

Said Mike Smith, 0-3 as a playoff coach: “I don’t know that there’s anything you can take from this game and say, ‘Gosh, they did this well.’ ”

How does that happen? How does a team with Matt Ryan, Michael Turner, Tony …

Continue reading The story of the Falcons’ season: One Giant step backward »