The Falcons lost, but the Falcons aren’t lost. That’s a distinction Arthur Smith has been eager to drive home over the past two days with 16 games ahead and a team that spent a spring and summer talking about defying outside expectations now in an early 0-1 hole.
Smith struck a lighter tone on Monday, but he’s clearly not interested in hearing doom and gloom about the Falcons in the immediate aftermath of the game. Smith and others in the organization have seen “peripheral opponents,” as he puts it, in the critics outside the building, and there’s a sense that the team is genuinely bothered by how readily they’ve been written off in 2-15 predictions and top draft pick discussions.