Atlanta Falcons

• 1. Introduction

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  Atlanta Falcons football exists because a rival league blinked first. When NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle heard that the upstart American Football League was closing in on Atlanta in 1965, he did not deliberate. He boarded the next plane to Georgia and forced the city to choose sides. By June 30 of that year, Atlanta had chosen Rankin Smith and the NFL, and professional football had a new home in the Deep South.

  Smith paid $8.5 million for the franchise, the highest price in NFL history at the time. Rozelle and Smith reportedly sealed the deal in about five minutes. The team that resulted from that hurried negotiation would spend the next six decades chasing a championship that, as of this telling, still has not arrived. The Atlanta Falcons hold a distinction no other franchise wants: they are the oldest major professional sports team in America without a title.

  What follows is the story of how a team born out of a bidding war became one of the NFL's most resilient and heartbreaking franchises, capable of extraordinary heights and stunning collapses in equal measure.

• 2. A Name, A Number, A Falcon

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  Miss Julia Elliott, a schoolteacher from Griffin, Georgia, won the contest to name the new franchise on the 29th of August 1965. She wrote that the falcon is proud and dignified, with great courage and fight, and that it never drops its prey. Her entry beat out many others, and the name stuck.

  The Falcons' very first player was linebacker Tommy Nobis, a consensus All-American from the University of Texas, selected with the first overall pick in the 1966 NFL draft. As an expansion team, Atlanta also received the final pick in each of the first five rounds, and six weeks after the draft the league held an expansion draft in which Atlanta could select unprotected players from the fourteen existing franchises.

  Those early teams wore red helmets with a black falcon crest logo, and the original colors were chosen to echo two of Georgia's great college programs: the Georgia Bulldogs' red and black and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets' white and gold. The gold faded out after a few seasons. The white endured.

• 3. The Losing Years

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  Norb Hecker coached the inaugural 1966 squad and watched his team lose their first nine regular-season games. Their first win came on November 20, on the road against the New York Giants at Yankee Stadium. They finished that debut season with a 3-11 record, and the following year went 1-12-1, with the only victory a 21-20 win over the Minnesota Vikings in Week 7 of 1967.

  Hecker was dismissed after a 0-3 start to 1968, and a parade of coaches followed across the next decade. The only two winning seasons in the franchise's first twelve years came in 1971, when they went 7-6-1, and 1973, when they finished 9-5.

  The breakthrough finally arrived in 1978, when a 9-7 team made the playoffs for the first time in franchise history and beat the Eagles 14-13 in the Wild Card round. That same postseason, they fell to the Dallas Cowboys 27-20. Two years later, a nine-game winning streak powered the Falcons to a 12-4 record and their first NFC West division title in 1980. That season ended in the divisional playoffs, again against the Cowboys, 30-27. Playoff heartbreak had become a habit.

• 4. Deion, Favre, and Vick

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  The 1989 NFL draft delivered cornerback Deion Sanders to Atlanta in the first round. Sanders, nicknamed Neon Deion and Prime Time, brought a flashiness the franchise had never known and helped draw media attention to what had been one of the league's most anonymous teams. He also played for the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves simultaneously while suiting up for the Falcons, a feat that became its own kind of legend.

  In the 1991 draft, the Falcons selected a quarterback with the 33rd overall pick named Brett Favre. His rookie season produced four passing attempts, no completions, and two interceptions across two games. The following February, he was traded to the Green Bay Packers in exchange for a first-round pick. That pick-turned-franchise-quarterback would haunt Atlanta in the postseason for decades.

  A decade later, in the 2001 draft, Atlanta orchestrated a trade with the San Diego Chargers to acquire the first overall pick and used it on quarterback Michael Vick. The exchange cost Atlanta wide receiver-return specialist Tim Dwight and the fifth overall pick, which San Diego used on running back LaDainian Tomlinson. Vick went on to become the first quarterback in NFL history to rush for more than 1,000 yards in a season, reaching 1,039. His tenure ended abruptly when he pleaded guilty to charges related to dog fighting in Virginia and received a 23-month prison sentence on the 10th of December 2007.

• 5. The Dirty Bird Season

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  The 1998 season stands as the high-water mark of the franchise's first four decades. Under head coach Dan Reeves, quarterback Chris Chandler, and running back Jamal Anderson, Atlanta finished 14-2, the best regular-season record in team history. On November 8, they ended a streak of 22 losses at cold-weather sites by beating the New England Patriots 41-10.

  On the 17th of January 1999, the Falcons traveled to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome and upset the top-seeded Minnesota Vikings 30-27 in overtime to reach their first-ever Super Bowl. The celebration was short-lived. In Super Bowl XXXIII, they lost 34-19 to the defending champion Denver Broncos.

  The following season unraveled quickly. In the second game of 1999, Jamal Anderson, who had carried the ball 410 times the previous year for 1,846 rushing yards, suffered a season-ending knee injury. The team collapsed to 5-11. The franchise would not return to the Super Bowl for eighteen years.

• 6. Matt Ryan and Mercedes-Benz

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  On the 26th of April 2008, Atlanta drafted quarterback Matt Ryan third overall out of Boston College. Ryan started all 16 games as a rookie, was named the Associated Press Offensive Rookie of the Year, and led the Falcons to an 11-5 record in what had been an expected rebuilding year. New head coach Mike Smith earned NFL Coach of the Year honors that same season.

  The Ryan era brought consistent winning. In 2010, a 13-3 season earned the Falcons the top overall seed in the NFC playoffs and a franchise-best nine players at the Pro Bowl. In 2012, Atlanta started the year 8-0, the best start in franchise history, before finishing 13-3 and reaching the NFC Championship game, ultimately falling to the San Francisco 49ers 28-24 on a fourth-down pass broken up by linebacker NaVorro Bowman.

  By 2016, Ryan was operating at the peak of his career, passing for 4,944 yards and 38 touchdowns while posting a passer rating of 117.1. The Falcons scored 540 points that regular season, the seventh-most in NFL history. When they beat the Green Bay Packers 44-21 in the NFC Championship on the 22nd of January 2017, in what would be the final game ever played at the Georgia Dome, a second Super Bowl trip felt like destiny.

  Super Bowl LI ended instead as the most painful loss in franchise history. Atlanta led the New England Patriots 28-3 late in the third quarter. New England scored 31 unanswered points. The Patriots' 25-point comeback remains the largest in Super Bowl history. Ryan was later traded to the Indianapolis Colts on the 21st of March 2022, closing a chapter that spanned 51,186 passing yards and 321 touchdowns for the franchise.

• 7. The Stadium That Blank Built

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  Arthur Blank, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, purchased the Falcons on the 6th of December 2001, for a reported $545 million. NFL owners approved the deal unanimously at a special meeting before Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans on the 2nd of February 2002.

  Blank's most lasting physical contribution to the franchise was Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The project was built to replace the aging Georgia Dome and to position Atlanta to host future Super Bowls. Blank committed $800 million of his own money. The city of Atlanta contributed an additional $200 million through bonds backed by hotel and motel tax revenue. Blank's foundation and the city each added $15 million for development in surrounding neighborhoods. The total cost, originally estimated at around $1 billion, was revised to $1.5 billion. Atlanta's city council voted 11-4 in favor of the project in March 2013, and the stadium broke ground in May 2014.

  Mercedes-Benz Stadium opened in time for the 2017 season and became the first home for the Atlanta United FC Major League Soccer club as well. The Falcons' headquarters and practice facilities sit on a 50-acre site in Flowery Branch, in Hall County northeast of Atlanta.

• 8. Still Searching

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  Across their history, the Falcons have won division championships in 1980, 1998, 2004, 2010, 2012, and 2016. Their playoff record stands at 10-14. The overall franchise mark through the period covered in the source is 398-512-6.

  Ten players from their history have been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame while wearing a Falcons uniform, including Deion Sanders, Tony Gonzalez, Brett Favre, Morten Andersen, and Claude Humphrey. Humphrey is the only Hall of Famer who spent the majority of his playing career in Atlanta.

  Fourteen members are enshrined in the Atlanta Falcons Ring of Honor, including Tommy Nobis, the franchise's first-ever player, and Matt Ryan, the franchise's all-time leader in nearly every passing category. On the 17th of January 2026, the team named Kevin Stefanski, the former Cleveland Browns head coach, as the 20th head coach in franchise history. The city that chose the NFL over the AFL on the 30th of June 1965, is still waiting for the league's ultimate prize.