Written by Bill Barnwell at ESPN.com
On a Sunday that seemed to rain every single kind of bad game from the sky, the rematch of a Super Bowl classic turned out to be anticlimactic. The Falcons were unable to extract any revenge from the Patriots in a 23-7 loss Sunday night, going down 17-0 at halftime before a late touchdown kept them from becoming the fourth team to be shut out in Week 7. Atlanta fans who remarked after Super Bowl LI that they would have rather been stomped than have blown a huge lead got to see what the former might have been like amid an eerie fog in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
As much as it might be tempting to blame the soup-like haze that shrouded the field for the second half, both teams were subject to the spooky, fifth-generation-of-video-games-like conditions. Atlanta didn’t lose because of the fog. Instead, the Falcons can chalk up their disappointing performance to sloppy play and poor execution. If you want to understand why they never came close to emulating their performance from the first two-plus quarters of the Super Bowl and why Sunday’s game looked entirely different, there are a few key factors:
The Falcons had no interior pass rush
When I previewed the Super Bowl last season, I wrote at length about how the game would come down to whether the Falcons would be able to get pressure on Tom Brady, specifically from the interior. The game ended up turning on pass pressure, as the Falcons chased Brady around for three quarters, but he excelled once they gassed out under a nearly unprecedented workload of plays in the fourth quarter.
The player I made the mistake of not mentioning in that preview was Grady Jarrett, who racked up three sacks and four knockdowns of Brady in a star-making performance. On Sunday, both he and the interior of the Falcons’ pass rush went missing. Atlanta was able to get early pressure outside the tackles, with De’Vondre Campbell coming unblocked off the edge for one sack and Vic Beasley Jr. beating Marcus Cannon for another, but the Falcons never had any sort of steady pass pressure from Jarrett or anybody else up the A-gaps. (Beasley also got away with an illegal hand to Cannon’s face on his sack.)
To continue reading this article, click here.
