It's Been 25 Years

The weekend before that game, I had been in Los Angeles losing on Jeopardy!. I was Ithaca College's contestant in the 2001 College Championship, taped at Pauley Pavilion on the UCLA campus, and I went out in the quarterfinals.⁴ I blew Final Jeopardy. The clue was about the Wright brothers and I said Ford Motor Company, and some part of me is still standing at that podium doing the math on what that answer cost me. I flew back to college with my new friend Sara, the contestant from Syracuse, whom I had a hopeless crush on but who would become one of my really good friends. We landed at the Syracuse airport, and then I took a 90-minute cab back to Ithaca, $2,500 richer and completely gutted. That same weekend, the United States began bombing Afghanistan. It is the only time in my life I have felt this country united about anything, and we were united about something sad and bad, and I have thought about that weekend for 25 years.

The next Sunday, October 14, the 49ers were in Atlanta. I could not get into the one sports bar in Ithaca that showed every game, because I was 20 years old and that is what being 20 years old means. So I missed the last 49ers win in Atlanta in real time. Garcia drove them 72 yards in the last two minutes and hit Owens with 17 seconds left to tie it, after Atlanta had gone ahead 31-24 with 2:22 to play. In overtime, after the 49ers fumbled away their first possession, Garcia hit Owens for 52 yards and the game was over, 37-31.¹ Owens caught nine balls for 183 yards and three touchdowns. Michael Vick, a rookie, is listed in the official gamebook as Did Not Play. I did not see any of it. I found out later, the way you found out everything in 2001, eventually.

No one understood on that Sunday that an era was ending in that building and nobody sent a memo. Garcia and Owens were the last 49ers to win in Atlanta, and within two and a half years both of them were gone in ugly divorces, and Steve Mariucci was fired, and the franchise walked into a dark age that lasted most of a decade. Erickson. Nolan. Singletary. I love Alex Smith and I rooted for him as hard as I have rooted for any athlete, and his whole prime got fed into a wood chipper of offensive coordinators: McCarthy, Turner, Hostler, Martz, Raye. The same Mike McCarthy who, as our offensive coordinator, helped pick Smith over Aaron Rodgers, then went to Green Bay and got to coach Favre and Rodgers. That is not a curse. That is just football being cruel in a completely documented way.

The trips to Atlanta got rare after that, because realignment sent the Falcons to the NFC South in 2002 and the old divisional home-and-home ended. Four trips in 25 years. The 49ers lost all four.² I have a story for each one, and the stories are not really about Atlanta. They are about where a life goes while a team is bad.

2007: the game nobody watched. November 4, 2007, exactly one year before the election of Barack Obama, the Georgia Dome, Falcons 20, 49ers 16.² Alex Smith played that game with a separated shoulder, because that is who Alex Smith was, and threw three interceptions, and after an opening-drive touchdown the 49ers kicked three field goals and nothing else. Atlanta started Joey Harrington because the Michael Vick experience had ended the way it ended. The game was blacked out in Atlanta, the Falcons' first blackout since 2001, because who wanted to watch that game? Both teams were struggling and everybody knew it. I want it on the record anyway, and huge respect to Smith for playing that hurt. It was an omen of everything he would go through later, and after all of it, he deserves more than the recognition he gets now.

2010: the one that got away, in every sense. October 3, 2010, Falcons 16, 49ers 14.² I was living in Orlando, working as a political field operative, and it was GOTV time, which means there was no time, and I was too broke for Sunday Ticket, and local television gave me Tampa and Jacksonville and Miami. So I read about that one on the Internet. Nate Clements intercepted Matt Ryan with about a minute and a half left and the game was over, and then Roddy White ran him down from behind and punched the ball out, and a guard fell on it, and Matt Bryant kicked the winner, and a game the 49ers had won became a game the 49ers lost in about ninety seconds. I was just sad about it, in that flat way you get sad about a team during a campaign. The thing that got me through that fall, honestly, was a huge Guardian piece about the Insane Clown Posse that I read with my fellow politicos in the trenches.⁹ It salved my dispride in the state of the 49ers. Ugh.

2016: the barstool. December 18, 2016, Falcons 41, 49ers 13,² and this one I watched, because by then I had moved back to Los Angeles after my final campaign, Ro Khanna's in 2014, and I was working on Preachers of LA, which was basically Love & Hip Hop except everyone was professionally Christian, and moonlighting as the Sunday karaoke DJ at The Oaks Tavern in Sherman Oaks. I watched from the barstool, commiserating with the bartenders. Atlanta scored on its first three possessions and led 21-0 after a quarter. It was the 13th straight loss, a franchise record, on a 1-13 Chip Kelly team, in the Georgia Dome's last season. I knew exactly how bad that team was. I was team Fire Baalke, and I was irate that the 49ers had fired Harbaugh for him, and a few weeks earlier a buddy from Hawai'i had talked me into flying up for the Patriots game at Levi's, which was so poorly attended that we scored 45-yard-line seats with the all-inclusive tequila bunker for $800, $700 under face, and stayed from the moment it opened until after the game using up every bit of it. Tom Brady kicked the Niners ass so hard that day, truly getting back at the team for taking future goat herder Giovanni Carmazzi over the actual GOAT. SMGDH…

The Faithful were the only functioning part of the franchise that year. A few weekends later I watched Kaepernick bring them back to beat the Rams at the Coliseum, with the Faithful taking the building over and Aaron Donald furious about it. Fun fact: before Kroenke built his monument to easy access debt in Inglewood, the Coliseum was already Levi's South. That was 2016. The team was a rumor, but the fans were real.

2022: the template. October 16, 2022, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Falcons 28, 49ers 14,² and this is the loss that matters for Sunday, so hold onto it. By then I had moved home to Honolulu, in November of 2020, because Jay Leno's Garage had gone remote and I could finally live at home for the first time since I was 18. That season had already broken my heart once. Trey Lance's ankle snapped in Week 2 against Seattle, a game I listened to on the radio and could not believe. Jimmy Garoppolo was back under center trying yet again to be the savior, and I had basically given up on the year, and then the 49ers went to Atlanta as favorites and were down 14-0 in the first quarter, one of the touchdowns a fumble run back the other way, and scored zero points in the second half. The quarterback who beat us was Marcus Mariota, a Saint Louis School kid, and I am a Punahou guy, so it hurt on the local level too.⁸ Four days later the 49ers traded for Christian McCaffrey. Six weeks after that, in the Miami game, Brock Purdy took over and the Era of the Irrelevant began. None of that had happened yet on that Sunday in Atlanta. All that had happened was the fall.

And then there is the exception, and the exception is the whole reason this is a story instead of a list.

January 20, 2013, the NFC Championship, the Georgia Dome, 49ers 28, Falcons 24, down 17-0, the biggest comeback in a conference title game to that point, sealed when NaVorro Bowman broke up Ryan's fourth-down throw at the 10 with 1:13 left.³ People ask me where I watched it and the honest answer is I do not know. That morning was the second inauguration of President Obama, also Punahou alum like Deforest Buckner, and I was in Washington DC for it, in person. I had just moved back to Los Angeles and work was lean and I was running on fumes and history at the same time, and the game got whatever attention was left over. The 49ers won a trip to the Super Bowl in Atlanta on one of the fullest days of my life, and it is mostly a blur. So no, I have never once seen a 49ers game in Atlanta properly. Not the last win, not any of the losses, and not the one that sent us to a Super Bowl. Twenty-five years of this fixture and my entire relationship with it is secondhand.

Is it a curse? No. It is a coincidence, and the coincidence has causes I can name. Three of those four teams were bad. The travel problem is real. The physics of football includes body chemistry, and West Coast teams get no help from their body clocks in a 1:00 PM Eastern start. I have checked the numbers on that, and the numbers are more specific than the folklore. Under Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers are 13-7 in 1:00 PM Eastern road games, and 13-3 in them since 2019, and 6-1 with Purdy at quarterback.⁵ The window does not doom them. But here is the split that should sober everybody up… In those 20 games, when the 49ers led at halftime they went 12-1. When they were tied, 1-1. When they trailed at halftime, 0-5.⁵ Not one comeback. Not one! And it isn't the rest either. Not coming off a bye, they are 11-6 in the window, and the three times a Shanahan team has played this exact week, Monday night at home and then east for the early game six days later, they won all three and led at the half in all three. The villain is not the short week. The villain is the slow start, because in this window, in nine years, a slow start has never once been survived.

That is not mysticism, it is the design of Shanahan's team. Kyle is a frontrunner, and I say that as a compliment with a warning label on it. His teams are built to play with a lead. The philosophy is get ahead, force the other offense to abandon the run, and let the pass rush put its feet on the throat of the opponent. The best way to neutralize Bijan Robinson is to game-script him out of the game, and you cannot game-script anybody out of anything down two touchdowns, which is exactly where the 2022 game was in the first quarter. The defense, meanwhile, is rounding into something real, potentially a top-three, championship-caliber unit, and I am genuinely excited to see Nick Bosa, Osa Odighizuwa, and Mykel Williams on the field at the same time. And that's to say nothing about adding Gracen Halton to the mix. Bless up for health, and stay healthy on that Atlanta turf.

Now the problems… My concern-o-meter for Sunday sits at about a 7.5 out of 10. The 49ers are, functionally, out of wide receivers. With Mike Evans healthy, this team wins Sunday by at least two touchdowns, because Brock is playing at an MVP level and that is what a healthy Evans does for this offense. Without him, against Washington on Monday night, the offense was straight embarrassing for long stretches, and a batted-down touchdown to Brandin Cooks at the line is the kind of play that changes a game script all by itself.⁷ Evans should sit Sunday, by the way. Give the Achilles two full weeks with the bye. Bosa needs to play, and Christian Kirk needs to play, but Evans sits. That leaves the seventh and eighth receivers on the depth chart starting, Cooks and Jordan Watkins, needing chemistry with Brock on a short week that already stole their full Wednesday practice, against a defense run by Jeff Ulbrich, a former 49er and a University of Hawai'i alum who Shanahan wanted to hire himself.¹⁰ Atlanta also has Bijan Robinson and Drake London, on a team that is 7-2 since last year when the explosive runs come and 1-5 when it gets held under 100 rushing yards.⁶

Everything about Sunday reduces to the first two quarters. Win the first half and the drought dies, because the 49ers do not lose these games from ahead. Lose it, and 25 years becomes 29 in a hurry, because the rotation will not bring this team back to Atlanta for a long time, and an NFC loss in October is the kind that follows you into January. That part matters more than the nostalgia. Minnesota is undefeated too, and Brian Flores is waiting in Mexico City,¹¹ and the goal is the 1 seed and a bye and home games in January, because for a West Coast team the alternative is Green Bay in a blizzard or Chicago in whatever Chicago does to people in January. Every win is a tiebreaker you do not have to beg for later. This is all putting the cart before the horse. I know. I want 7-0 really bad.

My heart says 49ers 35, Falcons 14. My heart does not get a vote in this column, and my head honestly does not know, and it does not know as much as the people whose 49ers work I consume every day, hat tip to all of them. There is no prediction here. There is a number, 0-5, and a first half that will decide which one of them gets to be the story.

Sunday, the game kicks off at 7 in the morning here in Hawai'i, one of the last early starts before the clocks change and mercifully hand us 8 AM kickoff times in the Aloha State. I will be up for it, the way I have been up for all of them, a 45-year-old man whose entire adult life fits inside this drought and inside a longer one: No Super Bowl win since I was 13 years old. Everything with this squad is win now, empty the clip, because this team is special and Brock is playing out of his mind and Lynch and Shanahan have somehow built a brand-new young defense in the middle of it. We just need to get healthy and stay healthy. Prayers up for the health of everyone on that field.

The last time the 49ers won in Atlanta, I was 20, on a plane, gutted about a game show, in a country that was five weeks into a new world. Win the first half on Sunday and I get to watch this one properly. Finally.

Sources (11)

1. Box score: 49ers 37, Falcons 31 (OT), October 14, 2001 (Pro Football Reference) Owens' line (9 catches, 183 yards, 3 TDs) and Michael Vick's Did Not Play are from the official NFL gamebook. ↩
2. Box scores (Pro Football Reference): Nov. 4, 2007 · Oct. 3, 2010 · Dec. 18, 2016 · Oct. 16, 2022. The drought was triple-checked against 49ers and Falcons series records, October 20, 2026. ↩
3. NFC Championship box score: 49ers 28, Falcons 24, January 20, 2013 (Pro Football Reference); Barack Obama's second inauguration was the same day, January 20, 2013 (Wikipedia). ↩
4. Tony Nagatani, 2001 College Championship quarterfinalist (J! Archive player page); the quarterfinal game, Show #3956 (J! Archive). ↩
5. The 1:00 PM Eastern splits are Essential49ers research computed from Pro Football Reference game logs, 2017-2026 (20 games). ↩
6. 2026 Atlanta Falcons schedule and results (Pro Football Reference). Robinson's explosive-run splits (7-2 with three or more explosive runs, 1-5 when held under 100 rushing yards) are from BetMGM's Week 7 matchup notes. ↩
7. 49ers escape Week 6 with a win over the Commanders (Niners Nation, Oct. 19, 2026); injury update: Mike Evans' Achilles tendinitis (Niners Wire, Oct. 19, 2026). ↩
8. Saint Louis and Punahou are Honolulu prep school rivals with a century of history. Mariota and Tua are Saint Louis men. Around here, that is not trivia. ↩
9. Ronson, Jon. “Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy.” The Guardian, October 9, 2010 ↩
10. Albert Breer: Shanahan called the Jets about Jeff Ulbrich in 2023 and was refused (Sports Illustrated); the 49ers were blocked again in the 2024 search (49ers Webzone); Ulbrich's playing career: Hawai'i, then the 49ers, 2000-2009 (AtlantaFalcons.com). ↩
11. NFL international games, 2026: Vikings at 49ers, Estadio Banorte, Mexico City, November 22 (Pro Football Hall of Fame) ↩