Atlanta Falcons; No better than 8–8 in 2017
The Super Bowl hangover is real; both from a physical stand point and a psychological one. Maybe two weeks doesn’t seem like much, but it could be the reason a player is still recovering from an offseason surgery instead of starting training camp in August. The psychological effect can be an even bigger problem, especially if they’re ahead by twenty-five points and choke away what could be they’re only chance to win a Super Bowl. I don’t care what anyone on the Falcons says, anytime they get a lead in the 4th quarter images of the Patriots will inevitably flash in their minds. But having said all that, the Super Bowl hangover is not the reason they won’t make the playoffs — it might be the reason they finish 5–12 instead of 8–8 or 9–7, but the reasons they won’t make the playoffs is much easier to see then the physical and emotional scars of Super Bowl LI.
The Loss of Kyle Shanahan
One of my favorite sayings in football is, “It’s not about the X’s and O’s; it’s about the Jimmys and the Joes.” It sounds cool and at most levels of football is 100% accurate. If you’re coaching a high school football games, and your running back is a 6'2" monster that runs a 4.4, whatever play you call is probably going to end well. That’s not really the case in the NFL. Good and bad offensive coordinators can make all the difference and Kyle Shanahan was a really good offensive coordinator. His replacement, Steve Sarkisian, is not. Sarkisian has one year of NFL experience…as a quarterback’s coach…in 2004. Just to give a little context, in 2004 Daunte Culpepper lead the league in passing yards, Curtis Martin lead in rushing, Muhsin Muhammad lead in receiving (all three are now somewhere in Boca Raton playing bocci ball), and there were only three Harry Potter movies.
Kyle Shanahan’s first year in the NFL was also in 2004, but he has spent the last thirteen years growing with the league, nine of which were spent running above average to elite offenses. In his nine years as an OC, his teams were in the top ten in the league in total yards six times, passing yards five times, rushing yards three times, and points scored three times. Well maybe he just had great players? Not quite, his quarterbacks before getting to Atlanta were: Matt Schaub in Houston, an old Donovan McNabb, Rex Grossman, Robert Griffin III, and Kirk Cousins in Washington, and a year of Brian Hoyer in Cleveland — not exactly an elite bunch. His skill position players weren’t much better, with the exception of Andre Johnson in his prime. His next best weapons were probably Santana Moss and Pierre Garçon in Washington. So with less than superb talent, Kyle Shanahan proved capable of putting together six great offenses.
There is perhaps no better example of his ability to get the best of his players than his first season as an offensive coordinator. At the age of 28, the youngest ever to lead an offense, the Houston Texans had the third most yards in the league. He also got 1,200 yards and nine touchdowns out of Steve Slaton. Who’s Steve Slaton? He was the small guy from West Virginia who in his other four years as a pro rushed for 614 yards… combined.
This is the level of coach the Falcons are losing. Someone who turned cans of tuna fish into mahi-mahi, and turned a talented Falcons offense into a historically great one. To think that they will be firing on all cylinders in the same way this season seems like a bit of a reach, especially with an offensive coordinator that has literally no experience in the NFL. A lot of people talk about Sarkisian as a great offensive mind, but I watched every game he coached at the University of Washington and while at times his offense looked unstoppable, I never got a sense that he had an offensive identity that he could hang his hat on, and he certainly never schemed subpar talent into overachieving performances.
The Fall of Matt Ryan
In order to reach the Super Bowl you need key players to play their best football. No one out played there previous seasons more than reigning MVP Matt Ryan. Last year, Ryan finished with a career best in completion percentage (69.9), quarterback rating (117.1), yards (4944), touchdowns (38), and fewest interceptions (7). In case you were wondering, that’s basically every significant quarterback statistic there is. It wasn’t even all that close in a lot of them either. His quarterback rating last year was eighteen points higher than his second best season. It was also only the second time in his career that he’s thrown over thirty touchdowns, and was seventeen more than he threw in 2015. That’s not just a career season, it’s the type of shit you see in movies where someone sells their soul to the devil only to have things backfire in a heartbreaking way…kind of like blowing a 28–3 lead in the fourth quarter. Hmm, interesting.
The touchdowns, and yards, and all of those other things are great, but the real surprise was the seven interceptions that Ryan threw. In the three seasons before his MVP run, he threw sixteen interceptions in 2015, fourteen in 2014, and seventeen in 2013; all good for top ten in the league. In his nine seasons he has only thrown fewer than ten interceptions in two of them. To drive this point home, in 2015, under the same offensive coordinator that we talked about above, Matt Ryan had twenty-one touchdowns and seventeen interceptions. Does anyone think that the Atlanta Falcons can go to the playoffs if their quarterback puts up that kind of stat line? I don’t.
Is it possible that Matt Ryan finally turned the corner in his career? Absolutely. It happens all the time with quarterbacks. He was the third overall pick in the draft, the first quarterback taken, so it’s not crazy to think that he has the talent to be one of the best quarterbacks in football, but even if all that’s true, I would argue that it is impossible that he will match his 2016 output. So if we start there, the only question is how much worse will he be? In the eight years before his MVP season he averaged twenty-five touchdowns and twelve interceptions, which is exactly what Kirk Cousins did in 2016, leading Washington to an 8–7–1 record. That would be the Kirk Cousins that as a starter has gone 19–21–1 in the regular season and 0–1 in the playoffs.
Injury Luck Doesn’t Last Forever
A healthy roster is the essential ingredient to a super bowl run, and in 2016 few teams were as healthy as the Falcons. The only significant season ending injury they suffered was to Desmond Trufant. While the loss of Trufant was a big deal, the Falcons were still a team that was led by their offense. So the loss of a defensive player wasn’t the kiss of death the way an injury sustained to one of their key offensive contributors would have been. And with the exception of Julio Jones who battled with turf toe and a few other injuries that cause him to miss a couple of games late in the year, the rest of their offense was remarkably healthy.
Their starting quarterback, top two running backs, and top three wide receivers all missed fewer than four games. But more impressively none of their offensive linemen missed a start. Not only did they play every game, they played nearly all of their team’s snaps. The Falcons were one of two teams in the NFL that had five linemen play more than ninety percent of their offense’s snaps, and the other team was the New England Patriots. In fact there were only three other teams that had four linemen play that many snaps — so, twenty-seven of thirty-two teams had three or fewer linemen playing together as much as the entire Falcons’ line[i]. Not all of these low numbers were caused purely by injuries, some of them were probably because the team had shitty offensive lines — cough, cough, Seattle, cough, cough — but the point remains that the health of their line was a huge part of their success and an extraordinary occurrence.
So this is the team coming off one of the most soul crushing defeats that that the sports world has ever seen, and they’re doing it without one of the best offensive coaches in the NFL, with a quarterback coming off a season that cannot be repeated, and an injury free run that would again conjure up ideas of some sort of foul play — maybe not a deal with the devil, instead perhaps a deal with some suspect doctor in Miami. Even if their young defense improves from last year, will it really be enough to overcome the crash down to earth from their offense, especially when it was their offense that carried them to the brink of a title.
If you look at the standings come the end of December, and see the Falcons sitting at 2–13 heading into the last game of disastrous season, you can blame it on a Super Bowl hangover. But if you look up and they’re 7–8 or 8–7, with little to no chance at a playoff berth don’t be surprised, because I warned you in September.
[i] Teams with 5 players over 90%: Atlanta, New England
Teams with 4 players over 90%: Denver, New Orleans, Oakland
Teams with 3 players over 90%: Buffalo, Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Green Bay, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, L.A. Rams, N.Y. Giants, L.A. Chargers, Tennessee
Teams with 2 players over 90%: Arizona, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington
Teams with 1 player over 90%: N.Y. Jets, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Tampa Bay
Teams with 0 players over 90%: Minnesota
