The fan confidence arrow is pointing up after Falcons make big changes

After Week 3, fan confidence hits 0% in our weekly Falcoholic Reacts survey, with hundreds of fans pretty simply saying they couldn’t believe in an anemic-looking 0-3 team that had blown back-to-back leads. That number didn’t budget after Week 4, when the Falcons looked even sadder against the Packers than they had through the first three weeks.

Atlanta lost again on Sunday against the Panthers to drop to 0-5, but a funny thing happened to fan confidence in the aftermath of that game. In this week’s Falcoholic Reacts, we went from 0% to 48%.

The why is obvious enough. Many fans had simply decided nothing was going to change this year, and that whether by virtue of players not playing well or Dan Quinn and company not coaching well or both, the Falcons were doomed and were going to muddle through the year as they were. The team’s decision to move on from both Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff gives a fresh jolt of hope to fans who were tired of one or both of them presiding over a continually inept team, and for at least one week it’s possible to imagine things going differently the rest of the way and a true fresh start at the end of the year.

Of course, we’ve seen what happens when these bursts of hope meet harsh reality, and there’s no particular reason to think that Quinn and Dimitroff were cursed figures and that moving on from them is suddenly going to get this team playing good football again. I would still expect the fan confidence number not to hit 0% again, because fans will have visions of new coaches and a new GM dancing in their heads to help convince them that 2021 might be different from the last three futile seasons.