Chances are if you have not seen Matt Ryan this offseason, he may be watching the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl on a daily basis. What would possess a man to watch his team’s greatest collapse in the biggest game of the year? For Ryan, it is his way of coping with reality.
At a golf outing in Georgia, Ryan explained to reporters he did not wait a long time before watching the fallout from the Atlanta Falcons’ Super Bowl loss to the New England Patriots. Up 28-3 in the Super Bowl, the Falcons lost in overtime, 34-28. It is one of the biggest blown leads in sports history, and Ryan watched it all again the very next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.
“No, I watched it,” Ryan explained. “I watched it a day after. I watched it two days after and I watched it three days after. For me, it was one of those things where you kind of want to be able to deal with it appropriately.”
There are some Falcons fans who probably have not turned their TVs back on since the Super Bowl, and here is Ryan watching the greatest loss in franchise history on a daily basis.
But as Ryan suggests, everybody copes in different ways.
“Maybe, that’s different for everybody. Some people bury it away,” Ryan said. “For me it was ‘all right, let’s watch. Does it feel the same way it felt as we were going through it?’”
Upon further reviews of the last moments of the Super Bowl, Ryan remains confident the plays that were called were the correct ones at the time. Instead of running the football, the Falcons chose to drop back and pass from the 22-yard line with an eight-point lead and just minutes to play. A field goal would have practically clinched the Super Bowl, but instead, Ryan was sacked, followed bu a holding penalty and an incomplete pass while Atlanta was no longer in field goal range.
Ryan could have shifted the blame on former offensive coordinator and new head coach of the San Francisco 49ers Kyle Shanahan, but Ryan took the high road.
“I love that they have confidence in me and that they have confidence in the guys that we have, and we are going to let it rip,” Ryan said. “Obviously, it didn’t work out.”
Obviously.
[Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
