TallySaint

Updated: July 7, 2006, 1:40 PM ET


Falcons should be back in playoff hunt

By Len Pasquarelli
ESPN.com


ATLANTA -- For lack of a better handle, and in the absence of creativity while recovering from five days of battling the crazed crowds that packed the Las Vegas hotels and casinos for the Fourth of July weekend, let's call them "rebound" teams.

They are, by the arbitrary definition we've created, franchises that advanced to the playoffs one season, failed to qualify for the Super Bowl tournament the next year but then rebounded into the postseason derby in the third season of the three-year cycle.

Since 1992, the third year of such a cycle after the NFL's adoption of the 12-team playoff format in 1990, there have been 29 rebound teams. In a 14-year span, that's a little more than two per season, and only in 2001 were there no rebound franchises. Ten of the 29 rebound teams since 1992 advanced to the conference championship game. Three rebound teams have gone to the Super Bowl, and one, the New England Patriots in 2003, claimed a championship.

In three of the four campaigns since 2001, there were three rebound teams, and there have been 10 in the past four seasons.

No reason to assume, given the volatility of the NFL and the fact that only four franchises since 2000 have failed to qualify for at least one playoff berth, that there won't be a few rebound teams this season, right?

There are, given the criteria, seven clubs that are candidates for rebound status in 2006: Atlanta, Green Bay, Minnesota, the New York Jets, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Diego. All made the postseason in 2004, and the Eagles played in Super Bowl XXXIX. All flopped relatively miserably in 2005, with the seven teams averaging only 6.6 victories and three of the clubs finishing in last place in their divisions.

But recent history suggests that, as badly as those seven franchises performed in 2005, some of them will emerge as rebound teams in '06. Our favorite (drumroll, please) for likely rebound status: Although there might be some residual delirium from the 106-degree temperatures that baked Las Vegas the past week (don't ever buy into that hackneyed "but it's a dry heat" malarkey), our choice is the Atlanta Falcons, a club that seems, in our estimation, to have been undersold in the run-up to training camp.

In one of the most anomalous and certainly ignominious records in the history of any professional sport, the Falcons have never posted consecutive winning campaigns in the 40-year history of the franchise. So, which of coach Jim Mora's first two seasons on the job was the aberration? His 2004 debut campaign, in which the Falcons went to the NFC Championship Game? Or the 2005 season, in which the Falcons won only twice in the second half of the year to finish 8-8 and in third place in the NFC South, and in which the engaging but also erratic Mora seemed to be his own worst enemy with a series of sideline meltdowns?

The truth about the Falcons, who are under intense pressure from ownership to win big in 2006, probably lies somewhere in the middle of those two polarized performances. The consequence of owner Arthur Blank's offseason spending and the all the defensive renovations promulgated by general manager Rich McKay and Mora could be, even in what figures to be a fiercely contended NFC South, a rebound return to postseason play.


Story continues....
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/column...len&id=2511977

My Guardian Angel wears a hard hat.