Falcons

Arthur Blank was not building a football team from nothing when Atlanta was awarded an NFL expansion franchise in 1965 — the league wanted a foothold in the growing South, and the Falcons took the field in 1966 with Tommy Nobis, the first player ever drafted by the club. Blank himself came later, buying the team in 2002.

In 1998, Dan Reeves took the Falcons to their first Super Bowl, and they lost to the Denver Broncos. In 2016, under Dan Quinn and with Matt Ryan throwing his way to the NFL Most Valuable Player award, Atlanta beat Green Bay to reach Super Bowl LI, built a 28–3 lead over the New England Patriots, and lost it in overtime. No Super Bowl has followed either run, which is part of why "The Dirty Birds" carries an edge as much as an affection.

Tony Gonzalez spent his final seasons in Atlanta before his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame in 2019, one of four Falcons inductees alongside Morten Andersen, Deion Sanders and Claude Humphrey. Mike Smith, for his part, remains the winningest coach the franchise has had, even without a championship to show for it.

Every autumn the sharpest fixture on the calendar is New Orleans, a rivalry dating to 1967 and known locally as the Battle of Georgia; Carolina and Tampa Bay fill out the divisional grudges. Since 2017 the Falcons have played in the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, capacity 71,000, having left the Georgia Dome behind after a quarter-century there — a downtown Atlanta crowd now watching a team still chasing the one result its history is missing.