Atlanta Falcons fans meet a 40-14 victory with the smallest possible uptick in confidence

Confidence in your favorite football team is an ephemeral thing. Rams fans are suffering a massive loss of faith in their team at the moment, and the same thing can happen to any team with a couple of lackluster efforts.

Then there’s a team like the Falcons, who have been awful for so long that there’s nowhere to go but up. Very slightly up, as the Falcons fans we polled in our weekly FanPulse effort went from a robust 7% being confident in this team’s direction to 9% after Atlanta beat the brakes off of Arizona.

Falcons fans have been a more optimistic bunch of late thanks to relatively successful 2016 and 2017 seasons, but this year has re-taught us that to trust and love this team is to suffer. That’s why very few fans bought into any redemptive narrative coming out of that win, and why very few will likely do so if they beat the Panthers, which seems like a real possibility. It’s smart to remain skeptical.

What will be legitimately interesting to me is where the fanbase sits after the draft and free agency, if this team is or is not able to add the kind of impact players that might lift them out of this morass last year. That’s months away, however, so for now we’ll just continue to be the unconfident bunch we justifiably are.