Falcons need more playoff-type players

Falcons need more playoff-type players
January 5 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Columnist Terence Moore

"Just because you soared or slid from the regular season into the playoffs, that doesn't mean you're a playoff team.

Ask the 2008 Falcons.

Better yet, ask Steve Wallace, the former San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle with three world championship rings.

Said Wallace, combining his 49ers past with the Falcons' present and future, "To win Super Bowls, you have to have those guys that will be playmakers - those guys that won't sit back and watch somebody catch a ball in front of them. That won't sit back and make a half-hearted effort at pushing a guy out of bounds. That always will have the mind set that this particular moment in a playoff game could be the difference in the game."

To hear Wallace tell it, the Falcons don't have enough of those players.

That's because they don't.

You could see as much during the Falcons' defeathering on Saturday in the Arizona desert. After their miracle regular season that included rookie NFL head coach Mike Smith and his rookie quarterback, Matt Ryan, leading a mostly youthful bunch to an 11-5 record, the Falcons were exposed in so many ways as a wild-card team. In the end, they lost 30-24 to the supposedly underdog Cardinals.

Wallace watched it all. Then again, he hadn't a choice. The Falcons are deep inside his still solid frame of 6-foot-5 and 280-something pounds. He's an Atlanta native who lives in Buckhead, where he remains so enthralled with the hometown team that he rarely has missed a millisecond of its games since his retirement as an NFL player 12 years ago. "You know how much of a diehard Falcons fan I am?" said Wallace, 44, who graduated from Chamblee High School along the way to Auburn. "As a kid, they were always blacked out locally, so I was glued to the radio listening to Bob Neal and Harmon Wages."

Wallace laughed. Then he sighed while recalling how the normally soft defensive and offensive lines of the Cardinals crushed their Atlanta counterparts.

There were numerous gaffes by Falcons linebackers and defensive backs. Star defensive end John Abraham and his aching thigh finished with just two tackles and no sacks. Michael Turner was tied for second in the league's MVP voting, but he couldn't run. Ryan was named NFL offensive rookie of the year, but he couldn't pass (at least not like he did throughout his prolific regular season).

Ryan fired two interceptions, contributing to the Falcons' three turnovers.

So this isn't surprising: More than half of those on the Falcons' roster on Saturday hadn't been in a playoff game before. "Sort of like deer in headlights," said Wallace, who detected a more specific problem regarding these Falcons.

They weren't prepared.

"I know the Falcons are used to crowd noise when they travel to New Orleans for a rivalry game in the Superdome or even in Dallas or other places, but playoff crowd noise is at a whole different level," said Wallace, who went to the playoffs every year during his
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