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Cheering from Defeat or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Atlanta Falcons

So. Here we are again.

It’s mid-January and the Packers, after a bout of the flu and miserable Dom Capers coaching, have once again been booted from the playoffs. This leaves us, the assembled fanbase of the Green and Gold, in the precarious position of finding a new team to cheer for on the road to the Super Bowl.

As Packer fans, our affection is not something to be tossed around lightly. We are, by definition, the actual best fans in football. I know this because we won the Campbell’s Chunky Soup Click for Cans charity contest so often that they decided to just stop running it. (13 years straight, from its inception to its close!)

So presented here are my own carefully considered thoughts on who to get behind now that the Packers are, regretfully, out of the running for the trophy that is rightfully ours. Your mileage may vary.

The Baltimore Ravens: The Ravens have had a nice upswing in the last part of the season and the playoffs (Did you see that double overtime win? That was pretty stellar) and Ray Lewis, the last original Raven, is retiring so it seems like they’re on track to be a “team of destiny” or whatever. But even if destiny is rewarding a guy like Ray Lewis by sending him to the Super Bowl again, I can’t really get behind him.

The New England Patriots: The Yankees of football, I’m just kind of tired of seeing the Patriots in the playoffs. That alone wouldn’t be enough to disqualify them from getting some Packer fan love, but add in ‘Spygate,’ the smugness I’ll get from Eliot if they win ANOTHER Super Bowl, and my jealousy of Tom Brady and I’m not going to back my revolutionary brethren.

The San Francisco 49ers: Some would say we Packer fans should want the team that beat us to win it all, thereby proving that we lost to the best. Others would want the Falcons to make Kaepernick into a smear on the Georgia Dome turf. I fall in with the latter.

Which brings us to…

The Atlanta Falcons: If the Falcons win it all, they’ll be the team that knocked both the Cheathawks and the 49ers out of the playoffs. They will be our own personal Packers Revenge Squad. They will have earned at least a portion of my undying affection and have the right to take the trophy bearing Vince Lombardi’s name back home with them.

They had just better be ready to give it back to us next year.