Hiring audible: Falcons should break model
ATLANTA – Arthur Blank wasted no time in pulling the trigger to fire Arthur Smith. Just hours after the Atlanta Falcons season ended on Sunday with an embarrassing loss at New Orleans, the owner dumped his head coach after three seasons to jump-start yet another massive search to get it right.
The announcement from the team came just after midnight, which meant that even without a New Year’s Eve-like ball drop, it was officially the day dreaded across the NFL as “Black Monday.”
The replacement? Well, this sure won’t come in a snap with a countdown clock.
“There is no timetable,” Blank said during an extended media session late Monday afternoon. “The only timetable is to do it correctly, take our time, be thoughtful.”
Of course, NFL policies established to slow down the process during the hiring cycle promote the cause for teams not to be in a rush. Even if they have visions of a particular target.
By now Blank, poised to hire his sixth coach since buying the franchise in 2002, should have a pretty good idea of how to navigate this element of his NFL business. Or so you would think.
The last time he went down this path, luring Smith from his role as hot Tennessee Titans offensive coordinator, Blank said the Falcons’ process, with a deep and diverse crop of candidates, was “widely saluted at the league level” – i.e. Roger Goodell and Co. – as a model for how to conduct a search. They interviewed seven candidates in 2021 and picked Smith from a group that included Todd Bowles, who, incidentally, just won another NFC South crown as Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach.
Well, three years later, after a third consecutive 7-10 finish, the Falcons are nobody’s model. They folded down the stretch, losing four of their final five games (the Saints and Bucs each won four of their final five games) to blow the division lead they held in early December.
For all of the praise that Blank and Falcons CEO Rich McKay heaped on Smith as they kicked him to the curb – strong leader, passionate, sharp football mind, great family man, among other virtues expressed – it is apparent that the inability to win the NFL’s worst division sent the coach packing with zero playoff berths added to his resume.
“We definitely underachieved this season,” Blank said. “By a lot.”
Blank was put off by the fact that Smith wasn’t able to match his calling card and produce the type of potent offense he developed with the Titans. Despite a bevy of talented skilled-position players, the Falcons’ decision to roll with young quarterback Desmond Ridder (a third-round pick in 2022) came back to haunt them. Ridder, benched twice during the season, ranked sixth in the NFL with 19 turnovers – with none as ugly as a red-zone interception in the final minutes at Carolina in Week 15 that set the Panthers (2-15) up for a game-winning field goal.
And such a mishap was part of a larger picture.
“Our record against losing teams this year was abysmal,” Blank said, alluding to a 2-6 mark against opponents who finished with sub-.500 records. “Honestly. We lost a bunch of games we probably should not have lost.”
Which leads the Falcons back to the fresh search. While McKay emphasized that the mission is to win “sooner rather than later,” it’s fair to illuminate a pattern. During Blank’s ownership reign, the Falcons have never hired a coach with NFL head coaching experience.
Sure, Dan Quinn led the Falcons to a Super Bowl in his second season on the job. And Mike Smith, whose seven seasons mark the longest stint for a Blankhired coach, took a team to the NFC title game.
Yet given results that have fallen short of winning the franchise’s first Super Bowl title – underscored by the loss in Super Bowl 51 when they blew a 28-3 lead against the New England Patriots – maybe the new search begs for an approach that places more weight on head coach experience.
After all, Blank recognizes how the head coaching job has become more complex and the NFL’s business model has expanded immensely during his years as a franchise owner.
Since the ill-fated decision in 2007 to hire a college head coach blew up in the Falcons face after Bobby Petrino lost the team’s respect and bolted back to the college ranks before completing his first season, Blank has gone the route of hiring coordinators.
Time for a new model? Obviously, there’s the tantalizing vision of finding the next John Harbaugh, Mike Tomlin or Sean McVay. It’s a strong model. Of the 14 teams in the playoffs, only three are led by coaches who had previous head coaching experience before their current jobs – Andy Reid, Mike McCarthy and Todd Bowles. That leaves 11 playoff teams directed by those on their first head coaching jobs, including DeMeco Ryans, arguably the front-runner to claim NFL Coach of the Year honors in his first year as Houston Texans coach.
It’s also interesting to note that three other playoff coaches – Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur and Mike McDaniel – passed through Atlanta as assistants before making their mark as head coaches.
So, as much as McKay believes that candidates with head coaching experience can bring value, he insists that there won’t be a bias as they enlist the help of a search firm and project to cast a wide net of candidates.
“Where you look should be incredibly broad and it should include head coach experience,” McKay said. “But it’s got to be the right head coach experience. And that is not so easy to find.”
Still, the Falcons need to chew on it hard, given their track record in going the coordinator route.
Make a run at Jim Harbaugh? That NFL head coaching experience now comes with a fresh college national championship crown.
Others with NFL head coaching experience include Brian Flores, Steve Wilks and Leslie Frazier. And suddenly, another projected candidate with head coach experience just hit the market as the Tennessee Titans fired Mike Vrabel on Tuesday after six seasons.
“I do think that being a head coach in the NFL is more demanding and more complex,” Blank said, comparing to the league he entered 22 years ago. “Players are coming into the NFL with a different set of life experiences today . ... I think a head coach, part of his job is to be a psychologist, putting a team together with the right kind of chemistry.”
In promoting a coordinator for the role, Blank added, part of the challenge involves balancing the staff to coincide with the coach’s area of expertise.
“If you hire somebody who has tons of experience as a head coach, they probably need less of that in certain areas because they have that experience,” Blank said. “If you hire somebody else, you’re going to have to figure out how do we make sure that they continue to focus on what got them here, which is great football results.”
Also unclear is how much control of personnel decisions the next Falcons coach will wield. Stay tuned. While Blank and McKay vehemently pushed back on the notion that general manager Terry Fontenot’s conspicuous absence from the news conference on Monday was linked to a lesser role, that’s still subject to interpretation.
During Smith’s reign, the coach and GM had a 50-50 power split when it involved personnel decisions, with both reporting directly to McKay. Yet Blank seems open to altering that split, depending on who the Falcons hire as the coach. He alluded to the Bill Parcells philosophy of allowing a coach to “shop for your own groceries” as a way it could play out.
“If it comes down to power, you’re in a bad place,” Blank said. “The word ‘power’ should never come into play. It shouldn’t be measured, necessarily.
“I do sort of believe in the Bill Parcells philosophy in that if you’re going to ask the coach to produce the wins and be responsible for the team record ... at the end of the day you’ve got to allow them to be partially responsible, or significantly responsible, for the recipes, the shopping for the players.”
It will be interesting to see how the Falcons – who will certainly be in the market for a quarterback, via free agency, the draft or by both means – proceed in this regard. In addition to buildingblock players such as running back Bijan Robinson, receiver Drake London and tight end Kyle Pitts, the Falcons are projected to be in the middle of the NFL pack with at least $20 million in salary cap room. And they currently hold the eighth pick in the first round of the draft.
McKay pointed out that when Quinn was hired in 2015, then-GM Thomas Dimitroff stayed aboard and helped maintain the direction of the team’s vision. The collaboration worked as the team won the NFC title in Quinn’s second season. Maybe that’s a model that will reflect on Fontenot and the next coach.
Then again, the effectiveness of the Falcons model may test Blank’s patience. Again.