Matt Ryan really wants to move on from Super Bowl LI talk
Win or lose, playing in a Super Bowl should be a highlight of any player’s career.
Matt Ryan would love it if everyone would just stop talking about the time he played in a Super Bowl.
This is Ryan’s life now, at least until he wins a Super Bowl. He and the other Atlanta Falcons will be asked about blowing a 28-3 lead to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LI forever. It’s probably the biggest collapse in sports history. It’s one of the most memorable games in sports history. Nobody is going to forget it.
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In a long story by D. Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal Constitution about Ryan going into the 2017 season, there’s the obligatory question about how Ryan and the Falcons will handle the disappointment of their Super Bowl loss.
“We’re already back at it,” Ryan said. “When we started as a team in April, we got together before that as players down in Miami, it was time to move on. It was time to look forward.
“Anytime that we kind of dwell on that, is wasted time. We have to focus trying to become the best football team that this group can be.”
You can understand why Ryan would want to move on, but good luck with that. Ryan is coming off a historic season. He won his first MVP and changed the entire narrative of his career. The Falcons won the NFC for only the second time in franchise history. Yet the first thing anyone will remember about last season’s Falcons is what happened after 28-3.
The Falcons are perhaps the first team in NFL history to spend the offseason not thinking about or talking about the Super Bowl. No matter how much they would love to move on from that loss to the Patriots, it’s not going to happen.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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