After epic Super Bowl collapse, the Atlanta Falcons 2017 motto is “Embrace the suck”

If you've got a coffee, a Coke, or *another* type of beverage in your hand right now, you may want to put it down because this will make you spit it out laughing.

Checking the calendar...it's not April 1st.

Checking the source...it's not The Onion.

(blinks repeatedly)

(cleans off glasses)

This is apparently actually happening.

The Atlanta Falcons, they of the 99.8% win probability percentage in the third quarter with 6:04 on the clock in the Super Bowl, officially have their marching orders from head coach Dan Quinn.

The official motto for the 2017 Falcons is “EMBRACE THE SUCK.”

And they’ve already got the swag to match!

Yahoo! Sports: If you’re the Atlanta Falcons, you’ve got two options: curl up in a fetal position, or embrace the suck.

The latter is the motto Falcons head coach Dan Quinn will preach for the rest of 2017. Falcons players arriving for rookie mini-camp and OTAs are getting wristbands with EMBRACE THE SUCK imprinted on them. Accept the pain. Steer into the skid. Or, as Quinn puts it: “Eat a crap sandwich with a smile.”

Bet you never saw that one on your gym’s whiteboard, eh?

And maybe I’m just a special little snowflake that reads too much into things, but isn’t that a bit, um, excessive?

Matt Ryan’s already said that he watched the game pretty much every day the week after the Super Bowl. Dan Quinn supposedly was going to call Steve Kerr and talk/presumably hate-talk about the Warriors blowing a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. Devonta Freeman called his missed block on Dont’a Hightower’s strip-sack “a scar”. Beastly wide receiver Julio Jones, who even people not from Atlanta could call as the best pass-catcher in the NFL, said that “I can’t give more than I put out there today. I gave you everything I had.”

On the flip side of things, though, the Patriots have definitely had their own share of motivational gimmicks that Bill Belichick has concocted over the years, and a few of them ended up bringing New England their first-ever Super Bowl victory when most Patriots fans still had a bad taste in their mouth after Drew Bledsoe and the guys getting beat down in Super Bowl XXXI.

Just in that season (the 2001-2002 one that ended up with the Patriots pulling off one of the greatest upsets in history against the double-digit favorite St. Louis Rams), Bill did the old “bury the game ball” routine after getting blown out by the Dolphins in Week 4, and that season’s training camp t-shirts, in peak early 2000s fashion, had “WANTED: WINNERS” in big print on the front, followed by the dictionary definition of a winner. And then a couple years later, in the Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl, there’s that famous clip of him going through Philly’s Super Bowl parade route, and then in 2004 he pulled the starters out of a preseason game against Cincinnati in the second quarter, then put the starters BACK in the game in the second half, just to prove that the team wasn’t as good as they thought they were.

Of course, that season ended up OK, too.

Other logistical question for the Falcons, though: if they do well next year, presumably that means they “embraced the suck”.

But wouldn’t they also “embrace the suck” if they do poorly?

(thinking face)

These are the things we think about in the offseason, friends.