RUNNING OFF COFFEE AND NEW YEAR VIBES — I am (and likely always will be) a believer in momentum.
When I was a freshman in college working as a bright-eyed reporter at the Red & Black, a student newspaper at the University of Georgia, my editor in chief said momentum and the effects of it weren’t real. His claim was that its a manufactured and lazy way to essentially say the team wasn’t performing at the peak and pace it had previously. It’s not the mythical, magical and unexplainable reason a shift in a game happens the way the media sometimes makes it out to be.
Which, OK, I can agree with that, sure. But even in that, I can’t say momentum doesn’t exist entirely. It’s like any emotion. Just because there is nothing tangible to explain why we feel the way we do, that doesn’t discredit the feelings we do have in any given moment. In sports, I see and feel momentum all the time, and I think any coach or player would say the same thing. It’s real. You can’t tell me that its not.
And if you’re the Falcons in 2024, momentum has been real for you, too.
When you’ve had it, things have been good. Really good. The Falcons had all the momentum in the world in the month of October. They left that month having gone on a tear, particularly offensively. They left the second quarter of the season feeling in complete control of their future. They were 6-3 overall, 4-1 in divisional play. Things were good. Momentum was theirs. Until it wasn’t.
Then, the pendulum swung the other way in the next five weeks of the season. By the end of November, momentum was lost, and with it went the wins.
It wasn’t unlike the Falcons’ first half success to second half woes in the overtime loss to the Washington Commanders on Sunday Night Football this week.
The Falcons put together a first half worthy of the 17-7 lead they took into halftime. Coming out of the locker room, however, one play — a third-down, new-life-giving, illegal-contact penalty on DeAngelo Malone — tilted momentum Washington’s way. It was momentum that, for the next quarter and a half, they never relinquished.
From the start of the third quarter until the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, it was all Washington. The Commanders put two consecutive double-digit-play drives together to Atlanta’s one three-and-out series. I’m talking 29 Washington plays to Atlanta’s three. I’m talking 139 net yards for the Commanders to the Falcons’ negative-1. I’m talking 14-plus minutes of time off the clock with Washington possession to the Falcons’ 2-ish minutes.
This quarter? It was their November.
