Falcons - Buccaneers reactions from The Falcoholic staff

What are our hottest takes after the Falcons - Buccaneers game? As you might imagine, we’ve got a few.

It was all a dream

Even though it hurt their draft position, seeing the Falcons destroy the Saints and Panthers in their homes was glorious. Unfortunately, they’ve returned back to normalcy as they couldn’t handle the Buccaneers. The Falcons in typical fashion crushed our dreams during the first half of the season, then provided us with optimism the past two weeks before crushing us again with the most recent loss. Only a couple more games and we can put this horrid 2019 season behind us. – Evan Birchfield

We are back home in the dumpster

I really wanted to believe the Falcons had made definite changes to improve the team. It is hard to say for sure, of course, with a small sample of only two games. Now we are back in the basement. A familiar feeling as of late. I had the thought the other day that since Matt Ryan’s epic rookie season, playoffs has been the expectation every year. This is the 11th season since his rookie season, during which the Falcons have made the playoffs five times. Only two of those produced a post-season win. I think I should learn to readjust my expectations to something that does not include the playoffs. - Matt Chambers

Same sh*t, different day ... week ... year ... whatever

The Falcons we saw against the Bucs were completely familiar. The anomaly was the two previous weeks, when they actually looked like a competent football team against the Saints and the Panthers. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, but it centers around the idea that we will never get what we want from the universe because of the inherent absurdity of the universe. It’s based on the actual Greek myth of Sisyphus, a dude who was stuck rolling a giant boulder up a hill for all eternity, only to have it roll right back down to the bottom each time. We are all Sisyphus, watching the Falcons play is that damned boulder, we’re apparently doomed to repeat this for eternity, and Camus may be right, because it feels like we’ll never, ever get what we want out of this team. Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus suggests we can find peace in embracing the absurdity. We might as well, because I do not anticipate anything with this team to change or improve until major leadership changes are made. - Jeanna Thomas

Typical Falcons

Of course. Of course the Falcons return home after a two-game road win streak and literally look pathetic against the lowly Buccaneers. How they played against the Saints and Panthers the last two weeks was a typical tease. Something that we have seen from this Falcons team on more than one occasion during the Dan Quinn era. Sunday’s outing against the Bucs showed just how inconsistent the team and the franchise itself can be and has been for quite some time. It’s pretty depressing to see this team take the field at this point. You want to get hyped and you want to have tremendous confidence but performances such as this deflates everything. - Eric Robinson

No more chances

At this stage of the game, it doesn’t matter if Arthur Blank engages in some frustrated firings on Friday or at the end of the year, but it has to happen. The story of the Falcons post-Super Bowl has been chances, with Dan Quinn having chances to hire and fire coordinators and hire and fire himself as the defensive play caller and Thomas Dimitroff having chance after chance to nail the lines, which are the perennial weakspot of this team. There have been successes along the way that we can properly appreciate with some distance from this crummy year, but the end result of all those chances is bad football, and even when the Falcons manage to play well for a while, they ruin it with a sad sack game against an inferior opponent, over and over again.

We’ve clung to the Super Bowl and the coaching staff and front office’s awards long enough. Losing to the Bucs so meekly after those two spectacular efforts against the Saints and Panthers tells us nothing’s going to get better for long. It’s time to see what fresh voices and fresh eyes can do for a team that does have enough talent to contend. - Dave Choate