Atlanta Falcons fans have to be among the thickest-skinned in all of football. Once you see your team let a 25-point lead in the Super Bowl slip away, there is pretty much nothing that can shake you to the core.
And yet, Sunday’s 24-23 loss to the New England Patriots — the very same team that managed that Super Bowl comeback — was yet another gut punch for the organization. So much so that our resident Falcons fan, Jeanna Kelley, later wrote on social media that “I can usually shake off a Falcons loss pretty quickly because I have so many years of experience but I’m still pretty mad about that one!”
It’s not hard to see why. The Falcons, after all, did something few teams have managed to do this season: truly challenge the Patriots. While they fell behind 21-7 in the first half, a fumble recovery set up a touchdown just before intermission that allowed momentum to take a drastic shift toward Atlanta.
The stage was set for an upset win. The Falcons clawed their way back into the game, they made Patriots QB Drake Maye look human, and in the end… came up short in part because of a missed extra point by a player who had been a perfect 10-for-10 from that spot entering Week 9.
The fact that Atlanta lost in part because (ex-Patriot) Parker Romo sent this fourth quarter extra point toward downtown Boston is not per se noteworthy; one-point defeats for precisely that reason happen on a regular basis in the NFL. It wouldn’t be the Falcons, however, if there was not some extra level of sheer dumbness involved.
So, here it goes. The team of head coach Raheem Morris lost not just because of that miss, but also because of a crucial intentional grounding penalty against quarterback Michael Penix Jr. and because they had to burn a timeout in the fourth quarter after a Patriots penalty had stopped the clock.
They also managed to lose despite holding New England to just three points in the second half, Drake London scoring three touchdowns, their defense registering six sacks and winning the turnover battle 2-0.
Open the history books, fellas, the Falcons are in town again.
While a) that set of statistics is quite arbitrarily chosen, and b) sacks are not officially charted in the NFL since 1982, the post above still is meaningful because it shows just how rare the circumstances surrounding the Falcons’ latest defeat are. They truly remain a spectacular team for all the wrong reasons.
And yet, if there is a glimmer of hope it is that the innate Falconness has seemingly not yet gotten a hold of the team’s young quarterback.
“It’s not frustrating. It’s football. It’s NFL football. Anything can happen,” Michael Penix Jr. said after the game. “Obviously you talk about not tying the game, but we still had a lot of time on the clock. I think it was four and a half minutes still on the clock. Defense went out there and got a stop, gave us an opportunity to put more points on the board, we didn’t do it. It’s never on one person, never on one play. It’s a whole collective thing. It’s a long game. We have to find ways to execute whenever it’s needed the most.”
