Falcons MLB Curtis Loftonis well on his way to making 2011 the best and most productive season of his career. A second-round pick in '08 — the inaugural draft class of GM Thomas Dimitroff — Lofton has started for Atlanta since Day One, and it's expected that Dimitroff will try to re-sign him before his contract expires next offseason. Lofton is among the league leaders in tackles with 76, putting him on pace to record 100-plus tackles for a third straight season. Being physical and stout vs. the run has been his trademark, but he's also improving in coverage, and head coach Mike Smith recently said Lofton's effectiveness this season as a blitzer has been impressive. Lofton showed his toughness in 2010, battling through knee injuries for the majority of the season and not missing a game before undergoing surgery on both knees after Atlanta was eliminated from the playoffs. A reward for his efforts isn't far off.
DETROIT -- Defensive tackle Corey Peters flicked his left hand in the air and tipped the ball, his pass deflection helping the Falcons preserve a 23-16 victory over the Detroit Lions on Sunday at Ford Field in a ruthless game.
“We knew we were in for a 60-minute battle as soon as we got off the plane,” Falcons coach Mike Smith said.
With Detroit driving for a potential game-tying touchdown, safety Thomas DeCoud was called for pass interference. The Lions were ready to get the ball first-and-10 at the Atlanta 20 with 1:38 to play. However, Peters' heads-up play, intervened. The replay official saw the tackle had tipped the pass, which negated the ruling on the field.
The Lions were left with fourth-and-10 from Atlanta’s 41, and Matthew Stafford’s pass to tight end Brandon Pettigrew fell incomplete. After the Falcons picked up a first down, quarterback Matt Ryan dropped to a knee and the victory was complete.
The Falcons improved to 4-3, while Detroit fell to 5-2.
“This is a big win,” wide receiver Roddy White said. “We marked this on the calendar. After getting back to .500 last week, we felt that this was a critical point in our season.”
The Falcons, the defending NFC South champions, were powered by the runs of Michael Turner, who finished with 122 yards on 27 carries. Three Atlanta receivers had more than 50 yards receiving, including tight Tony Gonzalez, who moved into second place on the league’s all-time receptions list with his fourth catch of the game late in the second quarter.
Gonzalez finished with five catches, giving him 1,104 in his career, second only to Jerry Rice, who has a seemingly uncatchable 1,549 receptions.
Also, kicker Matt Bryant, who made all three of his field-goal attempts, went into the team record book with 27 consecutive successful kicks. His clutch 47-yarder put the Falcons up 20-9 in the third quarter.
On Detroit’s next series, however, Calvin Johnson, formerly of Georgia Tech, got loose for a 57-yard touchdown catch to pull the Lions within 20-16.
Bryant added a 40-yard field goal with 8:41 left in the game. After an exchange of punts, the Lions went on their last drive that was ultimately halted by Peters’ big tip.
Since Peters’ play came under two minutes, it went to a booth replay.
“The officials did a nice job of handling it,” Smith said. “They did not allow them to go up there and snap the ball.”
Peters, who blocked a Stafford pass earlier in the game, was prepared for the quarterback's arm angle.
“I knew I tipped it,” Peters said. “I was just hoping they could see it on the replay. ... He does throw the ball out sidearm sometimes. He’ll get it out any way he can, so we wanted to get our hands up.”
The feistiness of the game began well before kickoff, when the Falcons came out of the tunnel and onto the field. The Lions were standing in the way, and linebacker Mike Peterson told them to get out of the way in not so polite terms and a near riot ensued.
There were thunderous hits and injuries to several players, including Ryan. The quarterback went down with a left knee injury after tripping over left tackle Will Svitek.
Detroit defensive tackle NdamukongSuh called Ryan names and asked in derogatory fashion for a "cart" to come out on the field to fetch the downed quarterback.
“It was NFL Europe-ish,” right tackle Tyson Clabo said, suggesting the Lions' actions were minor league in nature. “Nobody wants to see anybody get hurt or celebrate somebody get hurt.”
Ryan went to the locker room for an examination and a tape job, and was booed when he came charging out of the tunnel. He returned to the game and promptly tossed a 49-yard pass to Harry Douglas.
“[Suh’s] young and he’ll grow up,” Clabo said.
The Atlanta defense was up to the challenge for most of the day. Johnson’s touchdown was the lone blemish on what some Falcons dubbed their best game of the season.
The Falcons entered the game ranked last in the league on third-down efficiency after opponents collectively had converted 49 percent of those downs. of
Detroit converted on just 1 of 12 third downs. The Lions didn't pick up a third-down conversion until late in the third quarter, on their eighth try.
“[I was] very pleased with the way that we played on third downs and how we made it hectic and chaotic for the quarterback,” Smith said. “That was the thing that we wanted to do.”
Falcons middle linebacker Curtis Lofton had one word for the drastic change on third downs.
However today’s big scrap with the Packers turns out, the result is unlikely to shake up the Kingfisher, Okla., celebrity rankings.
Falcons middle linebacker Curtis Lofton could have the game of his young, tackle-rich life right there on national TV. He could actually catch, and bring down, Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, unlike the last time the two teams played. Wouldn’t matter.
Lofton’s not going to take over as the most famous person born in the tiny town (population 5,000) 30 minutes outside Oklahoma City. The late Sam Walton will own that title for as long as the land remains covered up in Walmarts.
Being wedged in there at the No. 2 spot of famous Kingfisherites is hardly a terrible fate.
Lofton is only 25 and so well regarded in his hometown that there already is a statue of him in the making. As part of a project called “Kingfisher Legacy,” statues of characters from the city’s past and present are being commissioned for every street corner. Twelve should just about cover up Main Street, said John Gooden, the Kingfisher artist in charge.
As the funding falls into place, those who will be committed to bronze include a man who walked from Mississippi to Kingfisher and became a local legend by singing at the train depot for troops as they left for WWI; a former territorial governor; a Native American newspaper columnist; a man who left Kingfisher to start the Iditarod sled race in Alaska; and the founder of the Coleman lantern company.
And another statue, not yet cast, of a football player who grew up in a small trailer by the railroad tracks, raised by his grandmother while spending more Sundays visiting his mother in prison rather than watching the NFL.
“Usually, statues are for people who died. I’m pretty stoked up about it,” Lofton said, happy with his status as both a noteworthy and still-breathing citizen.
Taking ownership
It’s not just Kingfisher residents taking note of Lofton.
“I’ve been really impressed with Curtis Lofton,” the Super Bowl champion QB Rodgers said, unprompted. “This is his [fourth] year, and he has jumped up another notch. He’s one of the most underrated players at his position. I’m hopeful, for his sake, that he starts getting the recognition that he deserves.”
That is a powerful endorsement, one of those that go right on the front of the book jacket of a player whose stock-in -trade is the solid more than the spectacular.
“It’s good that other top players recognize me,” Lofton said, careful not to be sweet-talked. “But [the game is] going to be a battle. He is the top quarterback in the league now, and we got to go out there and take care of business.”
The challenge of today is imposing.
The Packers came in here in January as a team that made the postseason last-minute, then rolled the top-seeded Falcons 48-21. Rodgers completed 86 percent of his passes for 366 yards and three touchdowns. He ran for one more and was more elusive than world peace.
Green Bay rode that wave through the Super Bowl and, at 4-0 this season, has betrayed no signs of running aground. Rodgers leads the NFL in quarterback rating and is second in touchdowns and fourth in yards. His team is scoring 37 a game, tops in the league.
Lesser quarterbacks have troubled the Falcons this season. Last week, Seattle’s Tarvaris Jackson threw for a career-high 319 yards in a Seahawks loss. The Falcons defense hasn’t recorded a sack in the past three games. A unit that in theory was upgraded this season is 24th in pass defense, 21st overall.
All this reflects on the middle linebacker, a position that demands personal ownership of every play.
He’s the one who wears the magic hat, the helmet with the radio receiver that relays the defensive coordinator’s orders. He’s the one who has to translate those barks into workable alignments, often on the fly.
He’s the one who, in the everlasting mold of Dick Butkus and Mike Singletary and Ray Nitschke, is in charge of delivering a message of violence. Like this season, Lofton led the team in tackles in 2009 and ’10. He hasn’t missed a game over that span, despite finishing last season with knees so grouchy that both required an offseason surgical tune-up.
Whatever this Falcons defense becomes this season, be it an improvement or an impediment, go ahead and pin it on Lofton. You have his permission.
“I feel like I am the face of this defense,” he said. “It’s a challenge. Each and every day, I got to bring a certain attitude, and that’s what I love doing.
“If something’s wrong, I feel I need to do something to get it fixed. Maybe I didn’t let ’em know what play was coming or I didn’t set ’em up to put them in the right position to make a play. It’s all about accountability to one another, and I’ve got to hold myself to that.”
This was not necessarily a role he was born to play. Arriving at Flowery Branch from Oklahoma in 2008 as the team’s second-round pick, Lofton wasn’t the automatically assertive type.
Having played the position for a half dozen years in Jacksonville, Mike Peterson came to the Falcons that same year and served as a guide to the demanding world of middle linebacking.
“When I first got here, he was in a shell, he didn’t want to be that [leadership] guy,” Peterson said. “Last year, you saw it a little bit more. This year, I’ve been pushing him a little more. I tell him, ‘[The players] hear me, but I’m not the guy in the middle. They want to hear you.’”
“It’s night and day in how far I’ve grown since getting here,” Lofton said. “When I first got here, I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Now I look at it as my defense. I got to take charge.”
Tough childhood
The challenges of asserting one’s self in a huddle of willful men, as well as those that will come today as the Falcons face the Packers, are not the most daunting Lofton has faced.
“That’s the bottom of the list,” he said.
Above that, he’d place those Sundays spent loaded in a car with his grandmother and two older brothers, making an hour drive to visit his mother at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. LaDonna Terrell was in and out of the joint for much of Lofton’s youth, more in than out, he said, up to his junior year in high school. She has since beaten back her trouble with drugs and alcohol and the crimes that spun off that, he said.
He speaks of growing up without a father nearby, growing up in a cramped trailer, having to mature at double-time.
He also says he wouldn’t change a thing about his upbringing: “It made me what I am.”
The linebacker coach at Oklahoma noticed something different about the kid from Kingfisher when he told an Oklahoma newspaper years ago, “He has substance about him.”
Rather than distancing himself from his origins, Lofton embraces them, no matter how far the NFL life may tear him away.
When his grandmother’s small church was flooded out in 2007, Lofton helped relocate it to a storefront on higher ground. The size of his donation is a carefully guarded secret.
The last time Lofton was home, the past offseason, customers at the First Capital Bank were a bit stunned when an NFL linebacker playfully began greeting them at the drive-through teller window.
“He hasn’t changed a bit,” Jack Stuteville, Kingfishers’ mayor and the bank president, said.
After two years of pleading, Lofton finally convinced his grandmother to let him move her out of the trailer, to a new house in a better area. “She called me crying the day she moved in,” he said. “That’s probably my best experience ever.”
That’s the very least he could do, he said, for the woman who raised him and sparked all his best instincts. Work hard, she preached. Keep the faith. Treat others as you want to be treated.
And, still, she is intent upon uploading more.
Last week, smiling and raising his voice several octaves, Lofton did an impression of the woman who has a difficult time processing the altered personality her grandson must assume on the field:
“Baby, you don’t have to be so mean to those boys.”
But, of course, his job is the very embodiment of mean. And Falcons fans from here to Kingfisher are banking on that quality today.
As lawyers for the NFL and the players met into the night on Tuesday in New York, it appeared as if the league's lockout was entering its final stages.
According to several media sources, legal staff for both sides are trying to finalize an agreement so it can be presented to the Players' Association executive committee on Wednesday.
The NFL Network reports the committee will present the proposal to the 32 player representatives. They will vote whether or not to recommend the proposal to the Brady plaintiffs.
If an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement is reached Wednesday, owners could ratify the deal when they meet Thursday in Atlanta.
When the players decertified their union, a lawsuit, led by Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, ensued against the league.
The NFL Network reported one of the proposed settlements has Manning and Brees being immune from the franchise tag for the rest of their careers.
Brees took to Twitter to respond.
"I hesitate to even dignify the false media reports with a response, but obviously they are leading people astray," Brees said.
San Diego Chargers wide receiver Vincent Jackson and New England Patriots guard Logan Mankins reportedly demanded to either be free agents or get $10 million as compensation for being plaintiffs in the case. Both players currently have the franchise tag designation.
A new CBA needs to be reached soon if the preseason is to start on time August 7 when the Chicago Bears and St. Louis Rams play the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio. The start of training camps, scheduled to begin the end of this week, will likely be delayed.
A source told the NFL Network that the plan was to have some training camps open a day late, but the others on time. The network reported attorney Michael Hausfeld led a group of retired players into negotiations Tuesday. Sources told the network that between $900 million and $1 billion in improvements have been negotiated for retirees.
The lockout, of course, began on March 12 after the sides failed to reach an agreement on how to split about $9 billion in revenue, among other issues like a rookie wage scale, the salary cap and retirement benefits.
In the four months since, they have battled each other in courts and during negotiating sessions.
The NFL and its locked-out players are making a negotiating push that appears to be aimed at trying to complete a deal on a new labor agreement by early July.
Neither side has commented on the specifics of the talks publicly, but people on both sides of the dispute said this week that a concerted attempt is underway to reach a compromise in coming weeks that would ensure an uninterrupted training camp, preseason and regular season.
The tone of the negotiations is greatly improved, both sides said, and while the talks still could break down, there is guarded optimism that a deal can be reached in late June or early July, according to people who are not involved in the talks but have knowledge of them. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deliberations.
Negotiators for the two sides met this week in New York after several days of talks last week in Chicago. On Wednesday, the NFL and NFL Players Association issued a joint statement that “they continue to be engaged in confidential discussions” with their mediator, Chief Magistrate Judge Arthur J. Boylan of the federal court in Minnesota, and that “discussions are expected to continue.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a conference call Wednesday with Tampa Bay Buccaneers season ticket holders that “both sides are working hard to reach an agreement” and that the ongoing talks are “a positive step for everybody.”
Goodell, according to an NFL spokesman, repeated that the league intends to play a full 2011 season. “I believe both sides want to find solutions,” he said. “I’m hopeful we’re going to be successful.”
Goodell was joined by five owners — the New York Giants’ John Mara, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Clark Hunt, the New England Patriots’ Robert Kraft, the Carolina Panthers’ Jerry Richardson and the San Diego Chargers’ Dean Spanos — at this week’s talks. Players Kevin Mawae, Jeff Saturday, Mike Vrabel, Tony Richardson and Domonique Foxworth joined DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the dissolved players’ union.
“At the end of the day, there is too much at stake to miss a season,” said sports law expert Gary Roberts, dean of the law school at Indiana University. “There is enough revenue. . . . The parties can work out a deal that can make both sides, while not gleeful, at least satisfied. That’s why I’m confident a deal will get done at some point.”
The players have been locked out by NFL owners since March 12 in a standoff that centers primarily on how to divide the more than $9 billion in annual revenue generated by pro football. One person who did not participate in the talks but has knowledge of them said the willingness to complete a deal has increased and, because of that, the negotiating differences between the two sides can be overcome. Others said the timing is right and the proper people now are involved in the discussions.
One person said the benefits of recently excluding lawyers from the talks may be overstated. But others said that development has helped reduce the level of acrimony.
Also, they said, the courtroom phase of the dispute has largely played itself out, with the NFL achieving some victories in a federal appellate court, which has indicated that the league is likely to prevail in its bid to keep the lockout in place.
Mainly, people in the sport said, both sides are realizing that time is running short, with many players unsigned for the upcoming season and the normal opening of training camps less than two months away.
Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said last month that a deal would have to be reached by about July 4 to allow time for a free agent signing period before a full training camp, preseason and regular season. Teams have been prohibited from signing free agents and trading players during the lockout. Most teams normally open training camps by early August.
A later deal could mean an abbreviated free agency period and a truncated training camp and preseason, with the regular season starting on time. But others view early July as a deadline of sorts, believing that if there isn’t a deal by then, it could indicate differences so great that the start of the regular season is in peril.
Roberts said he doesn’t share that opinion. He said a deal is most likely in August, after a ruling by the appeals court on the legality of the lockout. But he said that “both sides could hedge their bets” by completing a deal sooner, before the appellate court moves the negotiating leverage one way or the other.
“It’s all driven on both sides by the internal politics,” Roberts said Wednesday. “Both sides [initially] staked out rather rigid positions. As we get closer and closer to missing football games, I think the voices of reason will win out over the extremist voices and there will be a deal done.”
Strong sentiment remains that if the NFL and players can settle the central financial issue, the other elements of a deal would fall into place.
Before talks collapsed on March 11, the two sides were trying to agree on an annual salary cap figure for the NFL’s 32 teams. The two sides were about $10 million apart on that issue, or about $320 million league-wide for the first year of a collective bargaining agreement.
But to resolve the core economic issue, the league and players also would have to agree to a split of any future revenue that exceeds projections, a highly divisive issue during the March talks. In addition, any deal would have to address the NFL’s desire to avoid ongoing court oversight of the sport’s labor situation and the league’s proposal to blood test players for human growth hormone. The two sides also would have to find a mutually agreeable rookie pay system.
The talks have buoyed hopes for a deal. Agent Drew Rosenhaus wrote last week on Twitter: “It is nice to see the optimism back regarding a new CBA! Great [to] see both sides negotiating again — things are heading in the right direction.”
