The Falcoholic
Right before the deeply embarrassing season finale in 2023, where the Falcons were blown out by the New Orleans Saints to seal up a third consecutive 7-10 season, I wrote that Arthur Blank should have already known Arthur Smith’s fate. To me, that meant that if Blank was going to keep Smith based on a body of work that spanned 50 games at that point, a pummeling at the hands of the Saints shouldn’t change that; ditto in the opposite direction if the Falcons had dragged themselves to 8-9 by beating New Orleans. We know now that Smith was fired as the Falcons pursued Bill Belichick and then pivoted to hiring Raheem Morris; what we may never know is to what degree that final loss impacted the decision.
I bring this up now because the Falcons are at another pivot point, with Blank reportedly still deciding the fates of head coach Raheem Morris and general manager Terry Fontenot. He’s going to make a decision at season’s end, with at least some kind of unspecified changes to football operations on the table and the outside consulting firm Sportology doing a “health check” on the franchise’s operations, but we don’t have a real great sense of which way he’s leaning outside of Morris repeatedly talking about next year as though he’ll be here and a recent report from insider James Palmer that sources around the league expect the Falcons to move on.
Regardless of what that decision is, I’m going to once again urge Blank not to let it hinge on the final few games of this season. Here’s why.
Remember the 2019 season? The Falcons started the year 1-7 before going 6-2 in the second half to finish the season at 7-9, the team’s second straight losing season. At the time, I was urging Blank to fire Dan Quinn because of how unbelievably sloppy and listless the team was, but for some strange reason the owner was not inclined to listen to me. The Falcons then surprised a good Saints team, beat a (at the time) 5-4 Panthers team and then beat them again at 5-7, impressively knocked off a great 49ers squad, stomped a crummy Jaguars team, and triumphed over a mediocre Bucs squad in overtime in the season finale to finish 7-9.
Despite the couple of quality wins, it seemed dangerous to believe that a team riddled with holes and prone to long stretches of infuriating football would be able to replicate that stretch the following year, and predictably the decision to keep Dan Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff led to a 0-5 start to 2020 before Blank mercifully pulled the plug. The mistake Blank had made, out of fondness for Quinn, a desire to believe in things like momentum, and some good old-fashioned recency bias, was imagining that the final eight games were more relevant than the eight games that came before them. That’s a larger sample size then I’ll be discussing...
