The Loop
Aaron Rodgers got the Atlanta Falcons to jump offsides with a hard count where he literally just yelled “hard count!”
The Atlanta Falcons are 0-4. That should tell the whole story, but it doesn’t even come close. In Week 2, they led the Dallas Cowboys by 15 in the fourth quarter. They lost. In Week 3, they were up sixteen on the Bears in the final frame. They lost again, becoming the first team in NFL history to blow two 15-plus-point fourth-quarter leads in a single season, let alone back-to-back weeks. In the span of just 14 days, the Falcons went from competitive Wild Card contenders to number-one-overall-pick implosion candidates, wasting yet another precious slice of Julio Jones’ prime in the process. But if you thought it couldn’t get any worse inside the Dirty Birds’ $1.6-billion-dollar monument to mediocrity, on Monday they dropped another one in a tepid national television performance summed up by one play:
That's virtually every warm body on the Falcons's roster jumping offsides on a hard count in which Aaron Rodgers simply shouts “hard count!” In the immortal words of Mel Brooks, tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Now in all fairness, Rodgers is the hard count GOAT. No one has wreaked havoc on opposing pass-rush timing post-fake-spike Marino quite like no. 12. But when somebody LITERALLY tells you what’s coming and you still fall for it, well, that’s on you.
This may not be the final nail in the Falcons’ coffin, which has been getting hammered shut since about 8:31 in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, but you can’t deny that the optics are very bad for a supposed defensive mastermind like head coach Dan Quinn. Hell, even Steve Levy knew the hard count was coming and he’s been calling Monday Night Football for like fifteen seconds. Maybe Quinn survives until Black Monday, maybe he doesn’t, but one thing is certain:
He won’t be the first (or last) guy Aaron Rodgers puts out of a job.