Falcons’ ‘misfit’ secondary is ready for Tom Brady

HOUSTON – The Atlanta Falcons secondary is such a jumble of personalities and talent that they call themselves “The Misfits.” This group reflects the Falcons rise to Super Bowl 51.

Young, brash, bold. Played better late than early. Close-knit, push each other, induce team rewards. That is the Falcons secondary. It is exactly who the Falcons are as a team.

“Those guys really relate in that group,” Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff said. “It definitely shows. They’re so fresh … are we past the group of Millennials now and they’re actually something else? I just know they’ve responded well. They’ve accepted the coaching and the challenges.”

The starters are cornerbacks Robert Alford and Jalen Collins and safeties Ricardo Allen and Keanu Neal. Alford is a fourth-year player, Collins and Allen second-year guys, and Neal is a rookie. Very young, very fast, very hungry.

Their teammates say Alford is genuine, a hard worker; Collins is the fiercest competitor in the group; Allen is the funniest, the most giving in his time and teaching; Neal is the enforcer, a smasher, the guy who sets a physical tone with his menacing style of play.

So young, so raw, just a bunch of misfits earlier this season when they struggled and the Falcons defense was ho-hum. But they began to develop some spine, some confidence, began communicating on the field and started getting their hands on more footballs.

These misfits, the weak link, have become a Falcons force.

Their defensive backs coach, Marquand Manuel, helps reveal why.

Manuel played NFL safety for six teams from 2002-2009, starting in Cincinnati and ending in Detroit. He began coaching in Seattle in 2012. He joined the Falcons in 2015.

He is a hard-line coach with this secondary.

“I tell them, they don’t have to like me but they have to love each other,” Manuel said. “I do push them hard. My focus with them is not on winning and losing. We talk about excellence. We define a standard of excellence that we are demanding in their jobs. Despite the score, we focus on if we met the defined standard. We always reach to meet it, that accomplishment of fulfilling the game plan and the roles we have set for each player in each game. We believe if you reach that standard enough, you don’t have to worry about the winning. It comes.”

It’s a bad cop routine that the secondary embraces.

“Yeah, he’s always the bad cop and he’s good at it,” Allen said. “But it helps keep you on your P’s and Q’s. It helps build your confidence.”

Allen says he has written notes on the New England Patriots offense for the last two weeks. He said he has two books of notes totaling 100-plus pages. Nuances. Tom Brady keys. The Patriots multiple formations and attacks. Their play-making receivers.

The Falcons secondary says they realize that Brady and the New England offense will constantly adapt and evolve, employ five-receiver sets and then three-tight end ones, a mix-and-match plethora, a bid to exploit matchups and jostle this young secondary onto its heels.

The Falcons response will be critical.

“We are on the same stage together for a reason,” Collins said. “We respect them and what they do, but we also know how hard that we prepare and how hard we can play, so they are going to have to beat us on the field.”

Allen said the Falcons secondary wants to get into the Patriots faces and in talk amongst themselves a lot.

“You want to get tight coverage on them as much as possible,” he said. “You don’t want to give them free access to the ball because that is what they have been doing. They like for people to play off because they know that Tom Brady is very accurate at what he does.

“Communication. Communication stops a lot of bad plays. Our defense is not the most complicated thing, so we don’t have 1,500 checks. Our defense is very simple, it is easy to get aligned and we have everybody accounted for.”

Until they don’t.

That’s where the Patriots offensive wizardry arises. That’s where Brady’s acumen surfaces.

“We have been progressing each and every game,” Alford said. “We started out slow, but each and every week we progressed. So, toward the end of the year, we started reaching the ceiling. It started coming together as a group, and as people are seeing now, we are getting that ball back to the offense.”

Alford was asked if this Super Bowl will simply be a matter of one of these pass defenses finally getting a defensive stop along the way that helps their team win it. That for most of this spectacle, fans should simply expect both defenses to be torched and a game where the teams score more than 40 points apiece. An offensive circus everywhere and universal defensive meltdowns.

“You never know,” he said. “But I do know that we are the last line of defense back there. We can’t let balls go over our head. We have to help stop the run. You always have to save that blade of grass.”