Before I get started, I would like to invite everyone reading this to follow me on twitter @scashhomey.
As a person that was born and raised in Atlanta GA, I can say first-hand how great of a city that it is. I love it so much that I chose to attend college and live my adult life here. Honestly, I have never seriously entertained the thought of living anywhere else. Don’t get me wrong, I love to visit other places, but I definitely prefer to call the ATL home. This is a city with great weather, beautiful people, wonderful restaurants, lively night-life, and great venues to see live theatre and music. Why wouldn’t everyone want to live here? This is one of the few cities in America with big-city amenities, and a slow laid back life-style. As a matter of fact, I have met quite a few people who visited in the mid 90’s for a certain “black college festival,” and never left. You know who you are, and you are probably reading this with a reminiscent smile on your face.
Although I love so many things about my city, there is one thing that I absolutely hate about Atlanta. That is the fact that we absolutely suck as a sports town. Our teams epitomize mediocrity and will never be serious contenders for championships, and the fans here are primarily fair weathered who only root for the teams in the playoffs and only attend games when stars from other teams are on the schedule. It’s bad enough when the Hawks run ticket ads advertising the likes of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, but it’s even worse when party promoters are even throwing parties after those games “hosted by” stars from other teams. I guarantee you that Joe Johnson and Josh Smith aren’t hosting any parties in South Beach, and that they aren’t on the cover of the LA Times when the Hawks play the Lakers. This is despicable and it all stems from a city-wide acceptance for mediocrity. I for one am sick of it, and will not accept it any longer.
Atlanta is home to the Falcons (have not had a lot of success in their history, but are really trying these days), the Braves (mediocre and perfectly happy being that way), the Hawks (good enough to make the playoffs, but will never get out of the second round, and that’s OK with them), Georgia Tech (football will forever be average and the basketball team has a coach they can’t/won’t get rid of), and the Thrashers (its hockey, so I don’t care).
Georgia Tech is in a precarious situation. Their football team will never win big on a consistent basis simply because of the location of the school. Sure they may win their division within the ACC every 5 years or so and may even win the ACC Championship once every 10 years, but they will never have any sustainable success. That is because in a sport that is so heavily reliant on recruiting, they are in the worst possible location. They will never be able to out-recruit the University of Georgia, and they will also lose players that they covet to the likes of Florida State, Florida, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, and LSU. They don’t have the deep pockets needed to land top recruits who share a financial advisor with Cam Newton, and their academic standards are too high to admit the type of marginal students that SEC football has been built upon. Therefore they will never be big winners, although it is really no fault of their own. The geographic gods simply did not smile upon them.
Before I get to the basketball team, I must first ask, "Why is Paul Hewitt still the coach?" He has done absolutely nothing since the last 2003-2004 season and has missed the NCAA tournament in 6 of his 11 seasons at Tech (I am making the safe assumption that he will miss the tourney this year as well). One thing that Hewitt has proven is that he knows how to recruit the occasional no impact one-and-done player that will be a lottery pick in the NBA. Although these players don’t make impact while at Tech, they blossom into NBA stars (i.e. Chris Bosh and Derrick Favors in a couple of years). That being said, his coaching leaves a lot to be desired. He runs a run of the mill ACC team that is nothing special and has been playing in a virtually empty gym for the last two years. I always thought that Tech was a sleeping giant in the ACC, waiting to emerge and regain the status that is once enjoyed among the league’s elite. However, Hewitt has put the program into a deep hibernation that looks like it will be impossible to recover from all while happily collecting his $1 million plus annual salary.
The Braves are a franchise with a self-imposed budget in a sport in which the teams that spend the most usually win. Baseball is a sport where you really can buy a championship. Of all of the major sports, chemistry and teamwork matters least in baseball, which is why an owner can simply buy the best players he can find and they can win. The Braves are run by a faceless corporation as an investment property that they expect to return a designated annual return on their investment. This means that winning is not the priority, which begs me to ask why they won’t simply sell the team to someone who actually wants to own a baseball team and will not treat it as simply a line item on a balance sheet. The Braves in recent years have managed to have just enough talent to win the Wild Card and get slaughtered in the first round, and my feeling is that they have that as a stated goal again this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if new manager Fredi Gonzalez stands in front of the team after clinching the NL Wild Card this season and simply says, “Good job guys, mission accomplished. No go ahead and book your vacations to start after game three of this first round series.” Then all of the guys will cheer and pat themselves on the back, feeling a sense of accomplishment.
The Falcons are trying their best to build a winner and fight for respect in the NFL. Arthur Blank has hired a brilliant GM, who has in-turn hired a good head coach and drafted a quarterback that has been solid and has a promising future. That being said, they are still not a well respected franchise in the NFL. Although they went 13 – 3 last season and were the #1 seed going into the NFC playoffs, did anyone really expect them to make the Super Bowl? This is a solid team that is being built the right way, but they will never be fully embraced by this city for one simple reason. They lack a super-star. When they win, they will be embraced by a ton of bandwagon fans, but they won’t develop a true and loyal fan base in this city because they lack the superstar player. The Falcons were tremendously popular when they had Michael Vick, because he was a transcendent star. He is now gone, and the team will never be embraced the same way again. That is largely because this is a terrible sports town. In Atlanta, people will go to the games if it is considered the “it” thing to do, or if it is the place where they can see and be seen. Unfortunately the Georgia Dome is not that place.
The Hawks have frustrated me to no end. This is the only team in the city that I considered myself a true fan of. I watched them grow from nothing to the peaks of mediocrity. The problem is that once they got to mediocrity they forgot to look up and see if there existed anything beyond that. Until this year, I watched about 75 Hawks games per season. Although they were bad in the beginning, it was fun watching a young and exciting team develop. I didn’t care if they got their brains bashed in each night, I simply enjoyed watching the process and I felt as though I was in on the ground floor of something special. Well, I was wrong. What this team was building towards was nothing special at all. Instead of a team developing into a serious championship contender, we have a team that is good enough to be the fourth or fifth best team in their conference, and who is yet to win a second round playoff game. I didn’t say series, I said GAME! This year, I have probably watched about 10 Hawks games in their entirety. Not because I don’t want them to do well or because I don’t feel like they will win the championship (I didn’t expect them to win it this year or anytime soon for that matter), it’s just that I have seen this movie before. It is a very frustrating feeling to watch other teams make moves to get better, while your favorite team simply stays the same. When Miami signed LeBron James and Chris Bosh, we countered by overpaying Joe Johnson and signing Josh Powell. When the Knicks traded for Carmelo Anthony, we traded for Kirk Henrik. When Boston deepened their bench by trading for Jeff Green and signing Troy Murphy, we get Hilton Armstrong. Is anyone noticing a trend here? I am fan of teams making an effort, but unfortunately I live in a city where none of the teams (except the Falcons of late) are making a legitimate effort.
The bottom line is that I love my city, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (unless I was being paid an obscene amount of money). But sometimes the sports fan in me wishes that he could live in Boston where the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots start each season with the goal of winning a championship and spend each off-season figuring out a way to reach that goal. Maybe that part of me would like to live in Chicago where the Bulls seem to be building something special and the Bears are trying their hardest to become winners again. Or is the place to be now New York, where the Yankees are well, the Yankees and the Knicks are in the midst of building a serious championship contender. Truth be told, I don’t want the sports fan in me to leave my city. I would rather the teams in my city take their cue from these other cities and work to satisfy the sports fan within me and every other real sports fan in Atlanta.
Once again, be sure to follow me on twitter @scashhomey.
