Films are often layered, dense and complicated, yet we typically remember them by a handful of defining scenes.
You might not remember the intricacies of the Hyman Roth narrative in The Godfather Part II, but you will remember “Fredo, you broke my heart”.
Sports are the same. The Atlanta Falcons have taken many turns since drafting Matt Ryan third overall in the 2008 draft, yet they seem to be defined by the same themes, the same stories, the same game-ending whimpers.
To paraphrase the great Dennis Green, the Atlanta Falcons are who we thought they were.
The defining Falcons moment should have been their greatest moment. It came in the 2013 NFC title game against San Francisco. Atlanta had given up a 17-point lead at home, the largest ever on that stage, but they were driving down four in the final minutes.
They drove from their own 20-yard line to San Francisco’s 10 before two incompletions on third and four and fourth and four to Roddy White ended their season. It was a chain of events that would come to define these Falcons – perfectly respectable, but lacking a transformative edge to take the final step.
That playoff run represented the culmination of a stretch of five consecutive winning seasons in Atlanta, with four trips to the post-season and a 56-24 record. That was the good. The bad was a 1-4 record in the playoffs, including two embarrassing blowouts to the Packers and Giants.
Irrespective of their post-season shortcomings, the Falcons were set up to be a dynasty. They had a franchise quarterback in Ryan and perhaps the best receiving duo in the league with Julio Jones and White. The defence wasn’t exactly the ’85 Bears, but it had talent and the ability to generate takeaways, ranking fifth in the league in that stat in 2012.
The roster balance was uneven, with stars at the top and not that much underneath them, but in the vein of New England, Atlanta had cause to believe that their great players could carry their mediocre ones.
It turns out they couldn’t. The bottom has completely fallen out for the Falcons since that loss to the Niners. After a strong run of health, the Falcons were decimated by injuries in 2013, falling to a 4-12 record, and failed to rebound last year, squeaking to a 6-10 record and getting meekly blown out 34-3 in Week 17 at home by the Panthers in a winner-takes-all match-up for the division.
After a 5-0 start to this season, Atlanta have collapsed to 6-6, and are currently being given a 4.8 per cent chance of making the playoffs by FPI.
How did it all go so wrong? The simplest explanation is that the Falcons were never that good in the first place, benefitting from a historically anomalous run of tremendous luck in tight encounters. After going 27-11 in close games from 2008 to 2012, the Falcons have gone 9-15 since, hinting that their previous impressive records were perhaps inflated by chance and illusion.
The more appealing rationale for Falcon apologists is that injuries crippled this team beyond repair. The 2013 season was lost the moment Jones went down with a significant foot injury and 2014 saw a slew of injuries destroy the offensive line.
The explosive passing offence that was the heart of the team has been derailed by a series of unfortunate events – the Jones injury, Tony Gonzalez’s retirement, and age and niggling injuries reducing White from the superstar he was from 2007 to 2012 to merely a serviceable role player.
The real problem with the Falcons, though, is that if you want to take a stars and scrubs approach to building a team, you have to make sure that your stars are actually stars.
The Falcons made a powerful statement at the 2012 draft when they traded five draft picks to move up and select Jones. The message was clear: we’re sacrificing depth and relying on stars. Jones has been every bit as good as Atlanta could have hoped for, the problem has been that they haven’t found enough stars to surround him with.
Desmond Trufant is a foundational piece in the secondary, Devonta Freeman has been a spark, Jake Matthews has bounced back from a dismal rookie campaign and Vic Beasley has shown encouraging flashes, if not concrete pass rushing results. But that’s not nearly enough for a core.
Over the years Atlanta have depended heavily on veterans like White, Asante Samuel, Jonathan Babineaux, Michael Turner, Dunta Robinson, Justin Blalock, Steven Jackson, John Abraham and Osi Umenyiora, with varying results, but never satisfactory enough to achieve the ultimate successes.
The Falcons have focused on the ‘name’ positions on the field, and as a result the offensive and defensive lines have faltered, existing gloomily and unproductively, the products of rejection and ignorance.
Atlanta were the worst pass rushing team in the league across 2013 and 2014 and little has changed in 2015, as they rank 31st in the league in adjusted sack rate. The offensive line has taken a step forward, aided by Matthews’ improvement, climbing to ninth in the league in pass protection by DVOA. The problem is that the person they’re protecting might not be all that good.
Matt Ryan is 23rd in the NFL in passer rating, just below a couple of other Ryans, Fitzpatrick and Tannehill. Only Peyton Manning has thrown more interceptions than Ryan’s 13.
At the end of 2012, Ryan looked like a franchise quarterback. He was only 27, and coming off a season where he ranked top seven in the league in passing yards, yards per attempt, quarterback rating and touchdowns, while leading the league in completion percentage. In terms of quarterbacks you would want to have for the next decade, the only clear answers above Ryan were Aaron Rodgers and maybe Andrew Luck.
The wheels have since come off and the temperature has melted ‘Matty Ice’. He’s fallen out of the elite quarterback ranks, tumbling to the dreaded middle tier, where the likes of Kirk Cousins, Matthew Stafford and Alex Smith take up residence.
In the past two seasons, Ryan has had excuses with the Jones injury and a crippled offensive line, but this year the responsibility for an 18th-ranked offence falls squarely on him. The offensive line has kept him mostly upright, and in Jones he has one of the game’s handful of best weapons to play with.
The reality is that Ryan is a solid but unremarkable player masquerading as a star, whose weaknesses are being amplified by a team with a long history of solid but unremarkable players wearing the same masks.
A stars and scrubs approach to team building is fine; a solid and scrubs approach is not. The Atlanta Falcons have found that out the hard way.
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