Essay: Atlanta Falcons Pennant

Essay: Atlanta Falcons Pennant

This essay was written for a GSU 1010 class in Fall 2017 taught by George Greenidge.

View original item metadata

Jacob Tranter

2017

0201009-E

This pennant celebrates the 1998 NFC Champion Atlanta Falcons. In the 1998 season, the Atlanta Falcons reached their first Super Bowl behind QB Chris Chandler. They knocked off the #1 seeded Minnesota Vikings in an overtime win in which Minnesota kicker Gary Anderson missed his first field goal of the season. This allowed Atlanta to take the win with a game-winning kick in overtime. Morten Anderson, the Falcons then-kicker, went on to become an NFL Hall of Fame-r and is now the only Hall of Fame inductee on the 1998 Atlanta Falcons team. The Falcons won this game despite the Vikings being 11-point favorites coming into it and the Vikings having only lost one game during that year’s regular season and became the only 15-1 team in NFL history not to win the Super Bowl.

This win was a great moment for Falcons fans as the franchise had previously been dubbed “snakebitten” by many sports critics and analysts. Bleacher Report contributor Dan Weiner recalls “For most of the franchise's history, Atlanta was the whipping boy of the 49ers in the old, and geographically [challenged], NFC West.” Weiner even entitled that article “The 1998 Atlanta Falcons: The Team That Proved Anything is Possible”. This changed after the Falcons 1998 victory, however. The Falcons won the game 30-27 in overtime and the Dirty Bird fever spread across Atlanta. Despite reaching the Super Bowl, the Falcons did not take home the championship. The Falcons went on to lose 34-19 two weeks later. Despite this, the Falcons 1998 season is still remembered as only one of the franchises two Super Bowl appearances.

I’m Jacob Tranter and I am currently a poli-sci major at Georgia State University. I plan to study abroad for Fall 2018, in perhaps France or Italy, and join some clubs next semester. After I graduate, I plan to further my education by going to law school to study a currently undecided type of law. I’m from Newnan, Georgia but originally hail from Oxford, England.