The Falcoholic
The Atlanta Falcons want to win. This is not a team where the owner’s press conferences are more important than the product on the field, or a family operation where every penny must be carefully managed. Arthur Blank will spend, the team will pursue name free agents and swing big, dramatic trades, and coaching staffs will be juggled. The Atlanta Falcons want to win, but they don’t know how to win. They don’t know how to win because they never quite understand the moment they’re in.
What do I mean by that? It’s been obvious for some time now that the Falcons always believe they are closer to contention than they actually are, which has repeatedly led them to make decisions they believe will provide them shortcuts to relevance and make leaps that are risky at best and catastrophic at worst. It began as a desire to get back to the Super Bowl team of 2016 and morphed into an intolerance for losing that has paradoxically ensured the team loses more. At every critical juncture, the Falcons have shown a willingness to discard a carefully laid plan for something they believe will put them over the top; paradoxically, they’ve also shown a willingness to stick with plans that have clearly hit their expiration date. It’s been a multi-year muddle that has me convinced that the Falcons have simply never understood at any point in the last years where they actually are in their team-building journey, what they need to do to take the next step, and who the right people to lead that journey actually are.
Put on your reading glasses as we journey from 2018 to the present to elaborate on what I mean.
This is an example of the Falcons still believing their core was close, and perhaps the last time it was reasonable to do so on this list. Big deals for Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, Jake Matthews, and Ricardo Allen were prioritized over big money outside additions, with Brandon Fusco joining to shore up guard and Ron Parker to help out in the secondary, in addition to Justin Bethel to help on special teams and Logan Paulsen at tight end. The team drafted Calvin Ridley to upgrade their weaponry, Isaiah Oliver to start at cornerback, and got a pair of late round gems in Russell Gage (before injuries derailed his career) and Foye Oluokun.
The gamble here was that a team that was in the Super Bowl in 2016 and the Divisional Round in 2017 just needed some tweaks and an infusion of youth to keep the good times rolling; the problem was that in what would become a familiar refrain, the Falcons did not replace departing pieces and failed to think about contingencies elsewhere. Letting Dontari Poe, Adrian Clayborn, Courtney Upshaw, Taylor Gabriel, Andre Roberts, and Kemal Ishmael walk and only making a semi-serious effort to replace Poe and a real one to replace Gabriel with Ridley came back to bite them in...
