The Falcoholic
It’s a $250,000 fine for Atlanta and $100,000 for Ulbrich, but no loss of draft picks.
The NFL seemed likely to make an example of the Atlanta Falcons, as they have made a habit of doing in recent years, after defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich’s son Jax was confirmed to be involved in the draft day prank call to quarterback prospect Shedeur Sanders. While the Falcons got out ahead of it by releasing a statement apologizing and Jax reached out to Sanders himself to say sorry, the fact that the son of an NFL coach was able to get Sanders’ cell phone number and do that was something the league was going to frown on.
The question was the level of the punishment—fines? the loss of a late draft pick? Jeff and Jax Ulbrich forced to work on Roger Goodell’s spacious lawn?—and now we know the answer. After the Falcons announced they would not discipline Ulbrich, who they said was unaware and uninvolved in the call, the commissioner dropped the hammer in the form of fines for organization and Ulbrich alike.
Per Ian Rapoport, it’s $250,000 for the team and $100,000 for Ulbrich. Basically, the coach is being fined for leaving information where his son could get it, and the Falcons are being fined for...well, employing a coach who left information where his son could get it. It’s not clear the organization really did anything of note here except suffer from guilt by association.
The call itself was clumsy, dumb, and cruel, given that whatever you think of Sanders, giving someone going through an unexpected, very public fall a glimmer of hope by pretending to be a general manager and telling them you’ll pick them soon is extremely unkind. Prank calls of this nature are nothing new, but what made this a story was that Sanders himself was the story of the 2025 NFL Draft, thanks to the relentless promotion from his famous father Deion, ESPN and other networks, and of course Shedeur himself. When it became clear that the son of an active NFL coach had been behind the call, the league more or less had to take some kind of action here.
Despite the nature of the call—again, vaguely funny at best and cruel at worst—it never seemed likely that Jeff Ulbrich did more than leave a document open on an iPad that his son foolishly glommed on to. That’s careless and $100,000 is a lot of money, but as always, the league is eager to make examples of players or coaches involved in any high-profile situation like this, just as they did a year ago for the Falcons with the Kirk Cousins brouhaha. I still fail to see how the team was involved enough to earn a fine, but perhaps this is the price they pay for continually ending up on Goodell’s naughty list.
The relief here is that despite the calls from plugged-in NFL types for Ulbrich to be suspended or fired—yes, really—the Falcons aren’t cutting ties...
