By their nature, football players don’t do windows. They do keyholes.
Everyone else does windows. We look from the outside and measure the length and width of a team’s opportunity, as we perceive it, and declare that to be “their window.” It comes in all sizes. A season. Two. Perhaps the span of one transcendent player’s prime. And then it’s boarded up and just like that you’re playing for high draft picks again.
But a football player is conditioned to focus much more narrowly than that. Especially when asked about his team’s own window of opportunity, he’ll tell you that he instead looks through keyholes.
“From a player’s perspective, the window is always one year. It’s this team that we have right now – how good can we be?” said Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan.
“I think that’s something you learn the longer that you play. That sense of urgency, how quickly it goes by – 10 years go by in a blink. So, that sense of urgency has to be there.
“I don’t worry so much about the window you talk about – three years, two years, whatever. To me, we’ve got six months to be the absolutely best football team we can be. During that window we have to be as productive and all-in as we can possibly be.”
Window, keyhole, whatever the opening, Ryan and the rest of his Falcons certainly seem to be somewhere in the midst of most promising times. This, after all, is a team that in the last two seasons had a Super Bowl pass through its fingers like confectioners sugar, and was a play away from a conference championship game. Sure seems like a legit window, one that is open and inviting right now.
In the pages of Sports Illustrated, the Falcons have been predicted to win it all in a hometown Super Bowl come Feb. 3, 2019. Vegas routinely lists them among its top five NFC favorites to make the big game. Some would even call them a chic pick.
More importantly, more tangibly, this is a team that has made all the moves expected of one that realizes its time to win is now. The Falcons tore up the last year of their quarterback’s contract and further raised the salary ceiling, signing him for $150 million over five years. They did enough creative accounting to keep their star receiver momentarily happy. They enriched their left tackle and one of their leaders at safety.
Skilled on offense. Young and improving - and still affordable in a salary cap league - on defense. This is a team squarely at the intersection of exceptionalism and expectation.
Don’t get center Alex Mack wrong. His is the ultimate take-one-game-at-a-time practitioner. If the cliche hadn’t already been etched into the sports lexicon, he would taken up a hardhat and chisel and set to work doing that himself. Or as he put it, “You can’t look all the way down the road and hope and wish and dream for something else. If you don’t take care of business right up front, right now, it’s not going to matter in the end.” That’s the long version.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Still, a guy who labored for seven seasons in hopelessness in Cleveland – where every window is surely barred – can’t help but recognize the possibilities here and now.
“We have a good team with a lot of knowledge behind us. And an experienced staff that really knows what it’s doing. If we apply ourselves, the sky’s the limit,” he said.
Should the Falcons require an example of just how fleeting good times and high hopes are in this or any league – hey, no window stays open forever, or then it’s just a hole in the wall – they merely need look at the team on which they’ve been modeled.
Dan Quinn came from Seattle and brought with him the Seahawks template. Especially on defense, where the emphasis was rightly upon fast and furious. These Falcons are very much the young incarnation of that.
And didn’t the Seahawks show us the very definition of the competitive “window,” which all can make out now that it is just about closed?
The Seattle that was in double-digit wins every season from 2012-16, that won one Super Bowl and lost another for the sin of not handing the ball to Marshawn Lynch, is not the same today. It missed the postseason last year. And it currently displays all the ills that inevitably sap a very good team.
There’s injury: Two key members of the “Legion of Boom” defense – Kam Chancellor and Cliff Avril – both suffered career-shortening neck injuries.
There’s the toll of aging and the caprice of changing tastes: The Seahawks traded three-time Pro Bowl defensive end Michael Bennett to Philadelphia; and outright released the voluble three-time Pro Bowl cornerback Richard Sherman.
There’s dissatisfaction: See safety Earl Thomas’ prolonged holdout this year.
Thus are there just three members of the defense that started the 2014-15 Super Bowl currently on the Seahawks roster. And just like that, Seattle tilts toward the ordinary.
True, Seattle has shown the Falcons how a team should be assembled. But could this lesson on how a winning team can be so quickly undone – how all good chemistry is as volatile as a Kardashian marriage – be just as important?
So, burst all the way through that window as soon as you can, fellas.
How about now?
The Falcons two most important players – Ryan (33) and generational wide receiver Julio Jones (29) – aren’t exactly babes anymore. Not every quarterback – in fact, hardly any quarterback – is going to defy a calendar like Tom Brady. And when any receiver approaches 30 – especially one prone to foot problems – certain physical laws and limitations inevitably will encroach.
Jones, for one, doesn’t want to hear any of this window talk. “It’s on us, not what everybody else says about opportunity,” he said.
A realist, Ryan nonetheless would argue that his window is far from closing. After all, he just signed a five-year deal. “I’m not 23, I don’t have as many years in front of me as I did at 23,” he said. “I feel like I still have a lot, and I feel really good. But there’s definitely a sense of urgency that, one, comes with age, and, two, with experience.”
As for all his juniors on the Falcons, Ryan is certain they’ve gotten the message. “(Quinn) is as good as anyone I’ve been around of stressing to those young guys that the window’s now. They’ve got to be ready to play Week One and they’re going to be a critical part of why we’re successful.”
Week One has arrived. The defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles await. There will be no easing through this portal of opportunity.
And soon we’ll know whether these Falcons were serious about buying into all the championship talk, or just window shopping.
About the Author
