The Falcons won Sunday with neither Matt Ryan nor Julio Jones being the best player on the field. Whenever that happened last year, the Falcons lost. Sometimes they lost even when Ryan and Jones went wild. (Thinking of the second half in Green Bay.) That this team outlasted Washington in overtime with their main men playing supporting roles tells us these are newer, angrier Birds.
A year ago, these fallible fingers typed a sentence insisting the Falcons had nothing beyond Ryan and Jones. The man who’d assembled the roster sent a text of self-defense. “Quite exaggerative,” Thomas Dimitroff wrote, and he had a point – to a point.