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" I must have looked like a die-hard Atlanta Falcons fan last night. I watched the Falcons-Saints game in a bar. The bar was a thousand miles away from Atlanta. I was the only person watching, except for a guy who had Drew Brees on his fantasy team. Everybody else was celebrating the day after Christmas by meeting up with friends they hadn&amp;#039;t seen in a while. A current of well-worn intimacy ran through the place, but not exactly of welcome. There was no sound on the television, so instead of listening to Jon Gruden give vent to his adrenal glands I listened to a guy talk about his decision to give up acting and go to business school and a woman talk about trying to adopt a child she was fostering. And yet I stayed from beginning to end, crying out piteousy when Julio Jones&amp;#039; fumble got scooped up and taken back for the killing touchdown, and even when Matt Ryan failed to convert two successive fourth-and-1s in the fourth quarter. Nobody sympathized; nobody even noticed. I was an Atlanta Falcons fan in a Long Island bar. But I&amp;#039;m not an Atlanta Falcons fan. Nobody is. Sure, the team has its followers, its adherents, in Atlanta. But they don&amp;#039;t follow the team the way fans from other teams follow their teams \u2014 the way, say, fans of the New Orleans Saints follow the Saints. There has never been an away game when the announcers were prompted to observe that there are more Falcons fans in the stadium than there are fans for the home team. If each city gets the NFL team it deserves, then Atlanta deserves the Falcons by reason of its capacity for indifference \u2014 its amazing ability to remain unmoved. The Falcons and the Saints came into the NFL at around the same time, by way of the NFL&amp;#039;s initial expansion into the South. Both teams lost for vast stretches of their history, and so forged a rivalry akin to the rivalry between Southern states over SAT scores \u2014 a blood feud rooted in the notion that even bottom-dwellers need someone to look down on. And yet, like New Orleans itself, the Saints were always charming in their ineptitude; indeed, their ineptitude became a national story, a sort of NFL version of Southern Gothic. They were the &amp;#039;Aints, they had Archie Manning as their quarterback, and their fans wore bags over their heads. The Falcons claimed no such distinction; they just had bad owners, bad coaches, and bad quarterbacks, whose names no reasonable person had any reason to know. The only reason I knew them was because I lived there. I moved to Atlanta thirty years ago, from Long Island; I arrived a die-hard New York Jets fan, and only went to Falcons games when New York teams came to town. But geography exerts an overwhelming and perhaps final pressure: You start by rooting for the team from where you&amp;#039;re from; you end by rooting for the team from where you end up; and in between you try to figure out where you call home. I have lived in Atlanta all of of my working life, but never without a pang for the place \u2014 and the team \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve left behind, and so I root for the Falcons as a measure of my dislocation. I&amp;#039;m not alone in this; Atlanta is for many a temporary city, a city for middle-managers aspiring to be executives somewhere else. By being the home team in a city marked by transience, the local team for a city with a scant percentage of locals, the Falcons reflect Atlanta just as surely as the Steelers reflect Pittsburgh, or the Packers reflect Green Bay. And yet they are not a national team, either, like the Steelers, or the Packers, or, for that matter, the Saints. That&amp;#039;s been the paradox of the National Football League over the past decade: the emergence of an elite half-dozen teams, led by an elite half-dozen quarterbacks, that simply play a different game from everyone else \u2014 that continually attack, on both sides of the ball; that treat every possession as an obligation to score; that throw the ball anywhere, from anyplace, at anytime; that pass to set up the run rather than the other way around; that play not only at a high level of aggression, but at a high level of impact. They are the local teams \u2014 the teams firmly rooted in the lives of their fans, rather than simply the &amp;quot;lifestyles&amp;quot; \u2014 and yet they have become national teams because they seem willing to go for broke, play after play and drive after drive. They are teams that have an identity, rather than an identity problem, and they are the teams that drive through the playoffs by acts of will that seem not entirely their own.  And so the game last night was a contest between one of the teams that is powerfully local, and plays at a level of interest to a national fan base; and one of the teams that appeals to a fan base deracinated by definition, and is of no interest to anyone who doesn&amp;#039;t read the local sports pages. A contest, in other words, between Drew Brees and Matt Ryan \u2014 between a quarterback who aspires, in his 11th year, to avenge all the wrongs ever visited on him or his adopted hometown, and a quarterback who, after five years in the league, aspires to an abstracted idea of excellence, like any other middle-manager on the go.  Of the five great quarterbacks in the NFL, at least four are driven by the size of the chips on their shoulders, and of all of them Brees is the most interesting, because his talent is the hardest to define, and therefore seems to be an outgrowth of what used to be called &amp;quot;the intangibles.&amp;quot; I mean, you look at Brady, Rodgers, Roethlisberger, and the late, great Peyton Manning, and you pretty much know what makes them great; they are hulking figures who have both the ability and the willingness to exploit windows of opportunity that other quarterbacks in the league can&amp;#039;t even see. Brees is smaller than the rest of them; weaker of arm, and less identifiable in his release; more given to improvisation, and at the same time more dependent on precision \u2014 he&amp;#039;s the Steve Jobs of the NFL, in that you can&amp;#039;t figure out exactly what makes him great, but you know that the Saints would never have been great without him. Indeed, of all the great quarterbacks in the NFL, he&amp;#039;s the one who comes closest to artistry, and the one who broke Dan Marino&amp;#039;s passing-yardage record last night, with a combination of ease and, finally, with the time running out in the fourth quarter, outright greed. As for Matt Ryan: Ah, I know him well. He is probably the best quarterback in the history of the Atlanta Falcons, and the Atlanta Falcons are the team that best embodies the soul or soulessness of the city where I live. I spent last night at a bar in the place where I was born, bemoaning all the things I hate about the Falcons and their game \u2014 their dependence on the field goal; their dependence on passes within a 12-yard radius of the line of scrimmage; their tendency to call the run, after they miss a pass; their willingness to give up on drives, and dump the ball to running backs on third and long; their disavowal of the blitz: their apparent lack of courage and conviction. But of course I only knew about these things because I looked to all the world like a fan. I only knew about these things because in a room full of strangers who knew each other, I knew all about the Atlanta Falcons, and the Atlanta Falcons knew all about me.  --MORE ON MONDAY NIGHT: Sideline Reaction from a Saints Cheerleader THE MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RECAP SEASON IN REVIEW: \u2022 WEEK 15: The Real Tim Tebow, by Jeff Pearlman \u2022 WEEK 14: The Land Where They Call Him Peyton Manning, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 WEEK 13: The Call of the Night, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 WEEK 12: Losing Is Everything, by S.T. VanAirsdale \u2022 WEEK 11: Tyler Palko Is Not Tom Brady, by Eric Gillin \u2022 WEEK 10: Football Is Not a Woman&amp;#039;s Game, by Nate Jackson \u2022 WEEK 9: Michael Vick and the Silence of the Dogs, by Tom Junod \u2022 WEEK 8: Damn Philip Rivers, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 WEEK 7: The Pleasure of a Distant Game, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 WEEK 6: The NFL Hits the Mattress, by Scott Raab \u2022 WEEK 5: The Detroit Lions Have a Killer, by Jeff Pearlman \u2022 WEEK 4: An Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame, by Tom Junod \u2022 WEEK 3: The Fact of Football, by Tom Chiarella \u2022 WEEK 2: Quarterbacks Are Not Gods. Or Are They? By Nate Jackson \u2022 WEEK 1: Football Is Something We Can Agree On, by Chris Jones "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a12192/drew-brees-passing-record-6626269/>