Most bad franchises bottom out and rebuild. The Falcons found a third option: stay just good enough to never actually fix anything. It’s a more sophisticated kind of broken.

Fifty-five years old, lifelong Atlanta Falcons fan. I have earned the right to tell you exactly what this franchise does to a person over time, and it is not pretty.

Wins and losses are the language of sports, but they’ve never been the whole sentence. I’ve been a Falcons fan for decades, and I’ve learned to read between the lines.