Not to burn any bridges ...

but if he did indeed stick to the generic bulletpoints, that’s pretty disappointing. A spot on ESPN is an opportunity to really rep for the Falcons and let people who don’t follow the team understand what we’ve got going for us. When the average person hears “Matt Ryan is coming into his own, Turner is back in shape, so and so is back from an injury,” it means nothing to them. If you haven’t watched the Falcons closely, you probably don’t understand the attributes that give Ryan a much higher ceiling than the average QB. Turner’s 2008 numbers are just that, a set of numbers, if you haven’t spent time watching for yourself just how disruptive he can be to a defense when he’s at his peak. Nobody knows or cares about any of our players beyond three or four big names. We have a longstanding reputation as a crappy team; no one thinks our playoff appearance in 2008 signifies anything, and while we celebrated our long-overdue back-to-backs like we won the Superbowl, everyone else cocked an eyebrow and spent five seconds feeling vaguely impressed by the fact that Atlanta might not be a complete turd factory after all. All these interchangeable “Falcons on the rise” articles must seem to 95% of the football-watching population like storyline-obsessed sportswriters giving a borderline-decent team the benefit of the doubt in case they actually do break out this season and people start caring about them. And that’s probably not too inaccurate.

Being on a national stage to talk about the Falcons outside the constraints his AJC job might put on his content, I’d hope that a Falcons writer would view that as an opportunity to make a strong case for the team’s playoff viability, with some facts and stats that aren’t already common knowledge. The upside is that we’ll get to see the stupefied looks on people’s faces when the Falcons start kicking ass and no one can figure out why.