There is no unifying vision that can’t be discarded for a shiny object.
Somewhere in the wake of a Super Bowl dream that ended in crushing disappointment, the Atlanta Falcons ceased to be an organization with a coherent plan. The team’s subsequent slide into irrelevance, which has now lasted from 2018 to 2024, can be traced back to a number of factors too varied and complex to be recounted in a single article. But I have come to believe, as a long-term outside observer of this franchise, that nothing quite explains the team’s frustrating mediocrity more than an organization where nobody seems to be moving in the same direction at the same time.
This is why these Falcons have now five seven win seasons in seven years and one eight win season, rarely dipping into the NFL’s absolute dregs but never hovering that far above its grotesque basement dwellers. It’s why coaches and executives with bright ideas can bring in philosophies and talent that sounds great on paper but routinely fails to translate into results worth writing home about. And it’s why another spin of the wheel right now, in a crucial time for the franchise with Michael Penix looming as a rare spot of success, might not bring the results people want or expect.
A drifting franchise
To understand the root of the problem in Atlanta, you have to go back to 2018. That year the Falcons reversed their trouble and strengths from a frustrating but successful 2017, when the offense struggled and the defense carried the day. In 2018, injuries hurt the offense but the passing game returned to real relevance, while the defense transformed back into one of the worst units in the league.
Atlanta knew that changed would be necessary, and Dan Quinn cleared out of all of his coordinators, with Arthur Blank itching to return to the playoffs and seemingly optimistic Quinn was the right man to do it. That was an opportunity for fresh faces with new ideas, ones who could lift a team with a bit of a budget crunch to new heights. But that’s not what we got.
Instead, Dan Quinn assumed control of the defense, the ill-starred Ben Kotwica came on board on special teams, and the Falcons made an outlandish offensive coordinator hire that one immediately suspected was driven by the front office and/or the owner. That would be Dirk Koetter, who had one tremendous year with Matt Ryan in 2012 and escaped to go coach the Buccaneers before he could be fired in 2014. That move reeked of “let’s get back to the good old days,” but it wasn’t the only move that did so in 2019.
That same summer, the Falcons saw kicker Giorgio Tavecchio founder, which was a problem given that they had cut franchise legend Matt Bryant. Thomas Dimitroff had talked about how necessary that move was, but with Tavecchio and emergency signing Blair Walsh both struggling, the team went back to Bryant. Dimitroff’s video explaining the move has been a favorite of mine for years because of how blatantly obvious it seemed that a vengeful Blank had A) pushed to go back to Bryant and then B) pushed a not-thrilled Dimitroff in front of a camera to deal with the fallout. Remember this for later.
The 2019 season started off brutally bad, but was rescued late by Raheem Morris and Jeff Ulbrich taking over more ownership of the defense and getting it to play at a higher level, meaning the second half of the season was much more successful than the first. Still, Atlanta had endured two losing seasons in a row, which got Mike Smith fired, and it seemed obvious that Blank would move on. He did not.
The 2019 season stands out as a bellwether for everything that has happened afterwards. The Falcons had no business turning back to Bryant—he was cut in October in favor of Younghoe Koo—and no business turning back to Koetter, who wasn’t even successful beyond 2012 in any meaningful sense. But there was Blank, talking in circles about the second half improvement showing the Falcons were headed in the right direction and allowing Quinn and Dimitroff to bury the team’s cap picture even further in pursuit of success. An 0-5 start to the next season where the team was barely competitive finally, mercifully meant the end of an era for both. But it was not the end of Atlanta’s troubles.
The whims of an owner
No one around the Falcons would ever admit it, and reporting around the team has been light in terms of how involved Blank has been in the franchise’s key decisions. But while Rich McKay remains the fanbase’s favorite punching bag, Blank’s warring impulsivity and loyalty have long been apparent for the franchise he owns. From an admittedly outsider perspective, his fingerprints have been all over several key decisions in recent years.
If that truly ramped up in 2019, the year where Blank couldn’t bear to part with the executive and coach he knew so well and where he may have put a thumb on the scale for a familiar coordinator and kicker, it flared back up in 2022. The Falcons had made the somewhat unusual move of hiring Arthur Smith before Terry Fontenot, bypassing Brad Holmes and his handpicked hire Dan Campbell in the process, but after Fontenot made some tough calls in an effort to start digging out from under the cap, the Falcons put together a 7-10 season where Kyle Pitts looked terrific, Matt Ryan still looked capable, and young stars like Chris Lindstrom and A.J. Terrell were starting to blossom. There was plenty to like, and a plan in place.
Respected NFL insider Chris Mortensen (may he rest in peace) wrote in January 2022 that the Falcons intended to keep Ryan around for the year, likely with the draft providing a long-term contingency plan we would later learn was Desmond Ridder. Having a young quarterback learn from a franchise great and then take over was obviously something Blank desired, and would allow the team to be competitive while they continued to build up the roster.
But then Blank—and I will tell you with something approaching 90% confidence that it was indeed Blank—abruptly forced the franchise to change course. That’s because former Falcons ball boy Deshaun Watson, a player the owner had a friendly relationship with, had become available via trade. Never mind that the Falcons would have to blow up their offseason plans to take on a player credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault by over 20 women and his sure-to-be-massive contract, or that they’d have to trade Ryan to do so. Blank had decided that the brain trust he put in place to slow-roll a rebuild out of cap hell needed to move right now to flip massive draft capital and hand over the largest contract in league history.
We now know that had the trade worked out, it likely would have been the kind of disaster that dragged the Falcons to the bottom of the NFL, given Watson’s massive struggles at the helm of a talented Cleveland Browns team. But the fact that it didn’t still meant the Falcons had to move forward with trading Ryan, leaving them without a mentor and capable passer for the young quarterback to learn from. Blank immediately threw Terry Fontenot and Arthur Smith under the bus, downplaying the very obvious intensity of the trade talks and acting as though he was little more than an interested bystander in a process the owner almost certainly drove himself.
The obvious conclusion was that Blank was looking to make a splash, bad press be damned, but this is where the team’s lack of coherence from owner down comes in. Heading into 2023, the Falcons had an opportunity to pursue Lamar Jackson when the Ravens surprisingly placed the transition tag on him, giving them an admittedly remote shot at a much better player and person than Watson. The team responded by immediately putting out a statement saying they would not be trading for Jackson, and instead would be rolling with Desmond Ridder and (it would turn out) Taylor Heinicke as their quarterbacks. This fit the Terry Fontenot/Arthur Smith stated philosophy of building up a roster around a quarterback, but going from Matt Ryan to chasing Deshaun Watson to Ridder and Heinicke was a jarring shift.
We know, of course, that it was also a disaster. Ridder was bad, Heinicke was bad, and the team fired Arthur Smith unceremoniously shortly after the season ended. Then Blank, once again back in splash mode, began a single-minded pursuit of Bill Belichick that began with a meeting on the billionaire’s yacht, featured Terry Fontenot seemingly sidelined but not fired throughout the process, and then an abrupt reversal again that saw the Falcons hire Raheem Morris and effectively re-install Fontenot to prominence as the team’s unquestioned general manager.
That hire ended with the team cycling quarterbacks again, this time going in the complete opposite direction from the budget Ridder/Heinicke year and into signing Kirk Cousins to a megadeal and then drafting Michael Penix to have a succession plan. In the course of that, the team somehow once again leapt into acquiring a quarterback feet-first with what certainly did not look like enough due dilignece, moving at such warp speed that they were ultimately docked a draft pick for tampering with Cousins.
Enter the present day, and the Falcons are going to have to trade or cut Cousins, who was woeful throughout much of the 2024 season and may be done as a viable NFL starting quarterback post-Achilles injury. In the process of getting to Penix, franchise quarterback, the Falcons cycled coaches and players, but they also seemingly cycled philosophies at random and at the whim of the owner.
Why it’s hard to trust the Falcons now
While I obviously tie quite a bit of this back to Blank, his crashing into the decision-making process has only led to the most high-profile problems of recent years. The team’s problems go much deeper than an owner who desperately wants to win—more than you can say for many—but doesn’t know how to get his team there.
The team has been grasping at straws on the defensive side of the ball for years. Manuel’s one terrific year in 2017 gave way to his firing after a rough 2018, and then Quinn, Morris, and Ulbrich couldn’t achieve any consistency following that. Dean Pees put together an anemic, frustrating defense in 2021 and 2022, and Ryan Nielsen’s excellent year for Atlanta couldn’t keep him around when the Falcons brought in Morris. Now they have a decision to make on Jimmy Lake, who objectively did not do a good job this year with a defense that regressed in nearly every way you can think of, and have to re-tool the defense on all three levels. You get that with bad draft picks and bad signings, but you also get that when you do not have a coherent identity you’re building to over the course of multiple seasons. The Falcons have been guilty of that for many, many years.
That lack of coherence has translated over to offense, even if the issue has been less drastic. The Falcons had a pass-first philosophy under Matt Ryan that was supposed to transition to a run-first, balance-it-out approach under Arthur Smith, which saw the team make significant investments in the offensive line and running back group to get there. While that philosophy bore some fruit and continues to bear fruit—Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier are awesome, and this line excels at opening holes for them—the Falcons were better running the ball this year with no threat of play action with Cousins under center than they were in 2023 with a more ostensible focus on running. A team that wanted to shift to being an extremely crisp passing attack in 2024 was actually forced to lean more heavily on the run because the Cousins signing was such a disaster. The cycling of quarterbacks, the outsized importance placed on playmakers that led to the Falcons sinking four straight top ten picks into weapons on that side of the ball, and the trying-to-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-while-your-plate-is-empty nature of signing Cousins and drafting Penix have all led to a lot of static and disjointedness.
But that can be fixed, given the talent and given that Robinson seems like a credible offensive coordinator for Penix, who looks like he could be a franchise quarterback. The defense is being running by a head coach who spent years as a defensive coordinator and his hand-picked coaches, with a general manager who scooped up stars in Kaden Elliss and Jessie Bates, and with a raft of young players like Ruke Orhorhoro, Bralen Trice, DeMarcco Hellams, and Troy Andersen who will be counted on to improve. But it’s difficult to trust that will come together, because nobody associated with lifting this defense has had much success at doing so in Atlanta, whether they’ve been here four years or one.
This all merges into the Falcons’ singular problem: They know they want to be good, but they do not know what they need to be in order to be good. Blank waffles between loyalty that lingers too long and impulsivity that forces the team to change course, sometimes before their carefully laid plans even get off the ground. Blank’s advisers have very evidently steered him astray along the way, while his front office keeps missing on key picks and supposedly impactful trades designed to bring this roster in line with the contender Atlanta believes itself to be. The coaching staffs the team brings in either flame out, grumble about expectations and fantasy football while falling short of expectations, or bungle game management and lineup decisions to the point where they’re playing major roles in losing games themselves. The players outside of a small, tight core of greats battling valiantly year after year to keep this team afloat fall short of expectations themselves, and now the team will have to pay one of those disappointing players an enormous amount of money to go away.
The best organizations in football have alignment. Jeffrey Lurie with the Eagles trusts Howie Roseman to go out and build a contender, and the duo are comfortable making calls on coaches when it may not be popular to can them (Doug Pederson) or keep them (Nick Sirianni). The Steelers have a hands-off ownership suite that empowers Omar Khan and Mike Tomlin, who know they have rein to run the team their way and endure rough stretches without a sudden demand for a massive trade to shake things up. The Rams have an owner who gets out of the way as well, putting his faith in Les Snead and Sean McVay through real ups-and-downs to get the job done. In the case of the Eagles, it’s about having the right people at the top and an ability to move on from coaches when the situation is not working out; for the other two franchises, it’s patience, stability, and trust that means the teams can endure ups and downs without impulsivity. It’s organizational coherence, even if the backbiting in Philadelphia undercuts that at times.
The very worst organizations, meanwhile, look more like the Jets and the Bears. Woody Johnson in New York routinely undercuts his own people and lets his own family weigh in heavily on personnel situations, creating a carousel and creating a toxic plume over the entire franchise. The Bears have a more patient and reasonable ownership group, but one that empowers the wrong executives and allows them to survive hiring the wrong coaches over and over again. The Jets lack coherence and the Bears have the wrong vision, or at least the wrong people trying to execute it; the Falcons are far closer to these franchises than the model ones I listed above.
If there’s a bright spot, though, it arrived in 2024.
Penix offers a way out
Chances are that the Falcons burning so much capital and goodwill en route to Penix will not bite them as hard as it might because Penix looks like the guy. I know he missed throws in his first three starts and has work to do, but I also know his ability and his unflappable nature suggest greatness is ahead for him.
The only times the Falcons have been successful in Arthur Blank’s tenure came when they had a coherent team-building approach around a franchise quarterback. They built the team for Michael Vick and he carried them to multiple playoff berths and relevance, and then they built a balanced attack fit for a young Matt Ryan and a passing-friendly one for a more veteran signal caller that allowed the team to post winning seasons five years in a row from 2008-2012 and reach the NFC Conference Championship twice and Super Bowl once from 2008-2016. This team’s greatest follies have come when they’re chasing a quarterback instead of building around one, and if Penix is indeed that caliber of player, things click into focus for the franchise in a way they simply didn’t during the tail end of Ryan’s years and the messes that followed.
But to take advantage of that, the Falcons will have to show a unity and coherence that has been missing for far too long. If Raheem Morris is returning (and he is), he needs to make staff changes and lay out a vision for what this team will look like in 2025 and beyond to maximize what Penix offers the team, to say nothing of ironing out his game management errors. If Terry Fontenot is back (and he probably is), he needs to be able to show what this team is building toward and show how his acquisitions and draft picks are steering the franchise toward that end, not just point to a few big splashes and expect a quality top-to-bottom roster to emerge organically. And Arthur Blank and his inner circle need to, if they intend to stay out of the way and let Morris and Fontenot build the team their way, do so without following whims and inserting themselves into the process, and with a clear-eyed expectation for what happens if the brain trust falls short in 2025. If they can do that—and players and coaches are confident they can—perhaps we’ll be off this treadmill.
The Falcons need, in other words, to be better versions of themselves, working in relative harmony toward greatness. The Falcons squandered too many years of Matt Ryan’s career because they couldn’t get on the same page and define a vision for the team that they could then deliver on; they can’t afford to do the same thing with Michael Penix.