ATLANTA – This one’s on Leslie Frazier, and he knows it.

For the Vikings, a day’s worth of hard work was squandered by a couple of coaching decisions with about five minutes remaining.

With chaos reigning on the sideline, Frazier opted not to challenge a third-down play on which Percy Harvin may have scored a touchdown. At least some people, including one official, thought so. But the ball was spotted at the 1.

On the next play, fourth down, Frazier elected to send Toby Gerhart up the middle instead of taking a sure field goal. The Vikings were down 10 points at the time and needed two scores. But Frazier chose to go for broke, and it backfired. Gerhart lost two yards, and the game essentially was over.

It doesn’t get much worse than that.

“The loss is more on me,” Frazier said.

He said he told his players as much right after the game.

“We hit that fourth-and-1 late, and I decided that we were going to go for it, thinking that if we get this score, the next time we get the ball back we would be going to win the game. Instead, it went the other way, and that’s purely on me. It was a bad mistake on my part for putting us in that position.”

Frazier let his emotions get the best of him, he said. In the heat of the moment, he convinced himself the touchdown was almost a sure thing.

Maybe with Adrian Peterson in the backfield and maybe with a more proficient offensive line it would have been a good gamble. With the Vikings in their current state, however, it was an unnecessary chance. But perhaps more disturbing was what had occurred on the previous play. Two yards from the end zone on third down, Harvin took the handoff.

He came so close to scoring that one official was calling it a touchdown. Two others, according to Harvin, came over and said no.

“I thought I was in,” Harvin said. “I was trying to tell coach to challenge. But he said he couldn’t see it.”

Said Frazier: “From my vantage point, I couldn’t see it well enough to say if it was in or out. Nothing was coming from upstairs to say it was close enough to challenge it. If there were, if it were close, I think we would have challenged it if we thought he had gotten in.

“There was no dialogue from upstairs.”

I don’t know what the guys upstairs were doing. But almost as soon as the ball was spotted at the 1, I started getting emails from Vikings fans declaring that Harvin had scored. Apparently, a lot of folks back home were screaming at their TV screens for Frazier to challenge.

“I crossed the (goal) line,” Harvin insisted. “Coach had a lot going on. I asked him to challenge it. There was a lot of chaos going on. He’d already called fourth-and-1.”

What’s the harm in tossing the challenge flag? Harvin certainly was squawking enough. If nothing else, the break in the action would have given the coach a chance to clear his head.

OK, even if Harvin had scored, there was no guarantee the Vikings would have come back to score again and win. In fact, with this bunch, it’s very difficult to envision such a comeback. The same holds true if Frazier had opted for the field goal. No guarantees.

But if either one of those situations had been handled correctly, the game probably would not have virtually ended on the spot. The Vikings would have had a chance to fight on. Instead, the Falcons took over on downs and ran out the clock on a 24-14 victory.

This was not a good day all around for the coaching staff. The Falcons went to a no-huddle offense, and Fred Pagac’s defense appeared unprepared. In the first half, Atlanta repeatedly sauntered directly to the line of scrimmage and then held the Vikings in their stances during long, long counts. Then they’d hammer it up the middle. Some defenders couldn’t get off the field and were sucking wind.

Meanwhile, Bill Musgrave’s offense featured a game plan that was as dry as toast. There was little imagination shown in the absence of Peterson. And it wasn’t until the second half that Minnesota put together a decent drive. By then, the Vikings had an awful lot of catching up to do.

And then there was Frazier. Poor Les can’t buy a break this season. The front office is a cluster bomb, his players aren’t very good and his coordinators aren’t doing him any favors. On Sunday, he shot himself in the foot.

At least everyone won’t have to watch the film to find out where the biggest screwups occurred.

Tom Powers can be reached at tpowers@pioneerpress.com.