If you haven't seen it yet, here's second annual Q and A article... http://live4sportnetwork.com/atlanta-falcons-2017-preview-with-torgo/ If there are any other Falcons questions, feel free to post them here. If they're legit questions (as opposed to trolling or spam), I'll take a stab at answering them.
Follow up to the 2nd-last question in the interview. What about that Chicago rally and how will the team respond going forward? I don't think it can be taken as a conquering their demons just because it was stopped one play short.
I still don't think it's any kind of psychological thing for the team - though it certainly is for the press. Any time that any team threatens a comeback, the media will instantly have a Pavlovian reaction to try to connect it to the Superbowl. But comebacks and failed comebacks happen in the NFL several games every week. We saw one just like it in the Texans-Bengals game last night. It's going to happen - and it's going to happen to good teams more often as they're more likely to have second half leads than bad teams. My own reaction while watching the Chicago game was "how many times are they going to get away with false starts?" Since you mentioned the final drive... if you have the video, look at how soon the right tackle jumped back on the pass that set up the first and goal. I can see the officials not calling it when it's almost simultaneous, but that was just ridiculous. Something far more noteworthy that the TV crew of the Falcons-Bears game never brought up is that Mike Glennon has always played well against Atlanta. That dead-eye accuracy he showed to start that drive is something the Falcons have seen from him several times before. Against everyone else he has only completed 57% of his passes and has a QB rating of 79.8, which is why he's a career backup. But against Atlanta? Including this game, Glennon has now completed 69.7% of his pass attempts against us with 7 touchdowns, no interceptions, and a cumulative passer rating of 102.9. So frankly, we're happy to have that game out of the way. Never mind anything else we might hear about the Bears. It was a road game, the Falcons tend to play flat in season openers, and it was against Glennon. I'm happy just to escape with the win.
As a follow-up, we saw a taste of what happened in the Superbowl in last night's game against the Packers. Two of the team's named starters on defense (Courtney Upshaw and Vic Beasley) were injured and out of the game, leaving the team's defensive rotation a bit thin. Defenses around the league are still ramping up their conditioning after playing relatively little in the preseason. The Falcons were fine for most of the game, but not long after Beasley went out you could see the linemen trying to catch their breath during stoppages in play. This time Atlanta didn't mess it all up as badly as in the Superbowl. Sark did indeed know to run the ball more and had Matt Ryan snapping the ball with five seconds left on the game clock. They didn't score, but they at least managed a couple of first downs, burning the clock more effectively, forcing Green Bay to use all three time outs, and giving the defense a little bit of rest before Green Bay's final drive.
The problem is that our offense quits in the second half and the defense spends too much time on the field. That's bad for our defense because our defense is centered on speed. Running fast more often gasses our defense and we're vulnerable. We had a few good drives late in the GB game, else I am confident we would have lost that game. The offense has got to play much, much better in the second half of every game. They've got to eat up some clock so our defense can catch its breath.
