“But let’s call it the way it is: When you’re competing with people in the NFL, you have to understand that no one in the league is truly happy for you if you win three Super Bowls.”
In Atlanta, a city and franchise would be happy with one.
6
The New Falcon Vernacular
The old joke in Atlanta was that if you wanted to get rid of your Falcons tickets, the worst thing you could do was put them on the dashboard of your parked car, windows down, in plain sight for all to see. The car might not be there when you came back to the space, but the tickets certainly would. The Falcons were born in 1966 and immediately developed a reputation: If there was greatness to be had, they’d almost have it. And if you loved them, truly loved them, they’d always find a way to bring a new dimension to something as old as heartbreak.
They could have had one of the all-time greats, Vince Lombardi, as their first head coach but settled instead for one of his assistants, Norb Hecker. Four coaches and twelve years later, the Falcons made their first play-off appearance. But by that time, some fans had begun to refer to owner Rankin Smith and his family as “the Clampetts” after the fictional family of The Beverly Hillbillies. Perception of ownership aside, the Falcons had everyone’s attention in 1980 when they went on a nine-game winning streak, won twelve games, and hosted America’s Team in a divisional play-off game. What luck: They were facing Tom Landry’s Cowboys, but they didn’t have to deal with Roger Staubach, the epitome of fourth-quarter cool. Staubach’s on-field charisma and comebacks allowed Landry to pace the sideline without ever appearing to sweat or adjust his feathered fedora. Staubach’s retirement meant that the new starter was Danny White, who was just as likely to throw an interception as a touchdown pass. The Falcons had the Cowboys down by 10, 27–17, just six and a half minutes away from advancing to their first conference championship game … and they lost, 30–27.
Oh, the Falcons had it all. They slept through the 1980s, missing the play-offs for eight consecutive seasons. In their last home game of the decade, they drew an official crowd of seven-thousand-plus to Atlanta—Fulton County Stadium. The next day, which happened to be Christmas, they were outdrawn by the NBA’s Hawks, who had more than thirteen thousand fans watch them play the Cavaliers. As teams in metro Atlanta achieved success, from national titles in football for the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech to a string of division championships and a World Series title for the Braves, the Falcons changed coaches, uniforms, and stadiums yet managed to remain the same.
They had a coach, Jerry Glanville, whose gimmick was leaving tickets for Elvis. They came up with a gimmick on offense, too, with Coach June Jones’s Run and Shoot. In 1993, they could have simply checked off a contractual box that would have allowed them to match any offer that Deion Sanders received from another team. Sanders was the league’s best cover corner, a rare two-sport athlete who was also a Brave, and always one play away from an interception and a new end-zone dance. But the Falcons didn’t check that box, Sanders became an unrestricted free agent, and he played the next two seasons in San Francisco and Dallas, picking up Super Bowl rings with each team.
No one ever said the Falcons were without talent and smarts, on the field and in the front office. The Smith family hired Dan Reeves in 1997, which brought instant credibility. Reeves had played in the Ice Bowl, which wasn’t just Packers vs. Cowboys; it was Lombardi vs. Landry. He had won a Super Bowl as a player and had taken the Broncos there three times as a head coach. He was supposedly all Landry old-school, wearing a suit and tie on game days when most of his peers were getting by with thoughtless khakis, sneakers, and team-issued pullovers. But he also knew when certain types of old got in the way of doing good business.
As soon as Reeves walked into the Falcons’ offices, he noticed that the computer system was from another era. There was a bizarre operating code, and the system was not Microsoft compatible. He called for an update, revamped the scouting department, and hired Ron Hill, whom he had worked with in Denver, as one of his key personnel men. One year later, the Falcons had the most balanced and dominant team in franchise history. They won fourteen games in the regular season and earned a spot in the conference championship, where they were underdogs to the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings had the highest-scoring offense the league had ever seen, led by two receivers ticketed for the Hall of Fame, Cris Carter and Randy Moss. But for the first time in their history, the Falcons rewarded their fans with an unexpected overtime win, 30–27, and secured a spot in Super Bowl XXXIII.
Reeves couldn’t have been more familiar with the Falcons’ Super Bowl opponent. He knew the quirks of the city and the region, the skills and psychology of the quarterback, and the thought process of the head coach. Instead of standing with a bunch of overmatched Broncos on Super Bowl Sunday, Reeves was now across from them. They were led by two people he hadn’t always gotten along with when he coached in Denver: head coach Mike Shanahan, who had been his offensive coordinator, and quarterback John Elway, who had famously willed the Reeves Broncos to their first Super Bowl with a ninety-eight-yard march known as the Drive. Unfortunately for Atlanta, the Falcons-Broncos matchup took on the predictable theme of This Is Your Life, but the subject was not Reeves; it was the Falcons, with all their tragicomic history crashing the party before the party could even start.
Really, only Falcons loyalists could appreciate the absurdity of what happened the day before the game in Miami. Falcons safety Eugene Robinson was presented with the Bart Starr Award, given to a player for his high moral character and leadership. Robinson was an outspoken Christian, nicknamed the Prophet because of his ability to dispense Bible-verse wisdom. He proudly accepted the award on a Saturday morning, smiling as he stood with his wife and two children. Later that night, he drove down Biscayne Boulevard apparently looking to pay for oral sex. He wasn’t the first athlete to do it, and he wasn’t even the first Christian athlete to do it, but it was just fitting that he would do it on the same night that Miami-Dade police had targeted the Biscayne area and had a sting operation in effect to curtail prostitution and drug use. So fewer than twenty-four hours before the Falcons would play the most meaningful game in their history, one of their leaders was arrested, along with twenty-four other johns, and charged with soliciting an undercover police officer for oral sex. The Falcons had gone from the Hillbillies to Night Court.
Robinson played the next day, but of course, he was on the wrong end of the biggest play of the Super Bowl: Elway noticed that Robinson was badly out of position, and in a 10–3 game, the quarterback found receiver Rod Smith for an eighty-yard scoring play that officially lit the torch for the blowout. The Falcons would trail by as many as 25 points before losing 34–19.
There were more complicated days ahead for the Falcons in terms of producing consistent and reliable teams. Reeves displayed some foresight before the 1999 draft, but he didn’t feel comfortable carrying out a plan that didn’t have a lot of in-house support from his personnel staff. The New England Patriots were willing to trade their first-round pick, originally number 20 overall, for Falcons running back Jamal Anderson. Reeves was ecstatic. He liked the twenty-six-year-old back, but Anderson had carried the ball more than four hundred times in 1998 and he wanted to get paid. As a former running back himself, Reeves knew the team had already gotten the best from Anderson. If someone was willing to give up a first-rounder for an All-Pro power back who had carried the ball that much, as well as take on Anderson’s contract demands, Reeves thought they should leap at the deal. They didn’t, and two games into the season, Anderson had blown out his knee.
The franchise began to change two years later, in 2001. While they had played football for thirty-five years and never had back-to-back winning seasons, the Falcons suddenly had hope. A bold play had been made for the number one pick in the draft, which would be used to select Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick. Reeves was captivated by Vick, and long before the Falcons had traded with San Diego for the top pick, t
he coach walked around the office and referred to Vick as “the Offensive Weapon.” He envisioned building an offense around a quarterback with a sprinter’s speed and a right fielder’s strong arm. Vick was a kid, just twenty years old on draft day, but all the football people from either school, old and new alike, could see how gifted he was. There wasn’t a player like him in the league. If he could ever gather his multiple strands of talent and weave them together, he would lead and entertain and win. At least that was the dream.
As Vick was emerging in his first season with the Falcons, there was a deal being brokered between Taylor Smith, son of the Falcons’ founder, and a local businessman who had already starred in the average American employee’s daydream. Imagine: You and a couple friends start a business, but not just any business. You start a franchise that revolutionizes the marketplace, makes billionaires of you all, and crests as your former employer, who fired you, goes broke and belly-up. That was part of Arthur Blank’s story, the part that began in 1978 when, at the age of thirty-six, he was fired from his management job at a place called Handy Dan Hardware. Blank, Bernie Marcus, and Ken Langone were among those who decided that they would come up with a chain of stores that were bigger than the competitions’. This idealistic place, the Home Depot, would have more inventory, more engagement between employees and customers, better prices, and a philosophy of working—living, really—that couldn’t be altered.
“Bernie and I decided that before we began to think about succession planning and before we thought of who should become the next assistant manager and store managers and district managers, regional vice presidents, presidents, etc., our first question should always be, ‘Are they ambassadors for our culture?’” Blank says. “It’s ‘Do they believe in our culture? Do they live our culture?’ So that became more important than anything else they were doing. They could have been really good at whatever their job was, but if they weren’t great cultural leaders and weren’t strong when it came to character, integrity, trust, and didn’t understand what we were about, then they weren’t going to be promoted. It didn’t matter how good they were at their job.”
Blank bought the Falcons toward the end of the 2001 season, paying $545 million. In the beginning, Blank would be no different from many of the league owners whom he was now joining: On day one, nearly all of them have earnest smiles and a fresh-faced naiveté, confident that universal business principles and common sense can be applied to running an NFL team, too; by their second or third year, there’s the realization that, for example, conceiving and building Home Depot is one thing, while inheriting an NFL team, scars and all, is quite another. If you’re lucky, your kind of coach, your kind of front office, and your kind of team will already be in place. Realistically, it’ll take some firing, hiring, and maybe some mistakes before the organization is truly yours, in deed and principle. After that expensive and often humbling initiation, there’s usually an experienced “You don’t know what you don’t know” gaze reserved for the league’s next wide-eyed new owner.
For most Falcons employees, Blank’s arrival was a good thing. The new owner made it clear that he wanted the best of whatever money, persuasion, or goodwill could buy the Falcons. Best board of directors. Best facilities. Best marketing team. He was not some king in a tower, shouting instructions to peasants. He had a sharp sense of humor and a disarming smile, and his background allowed him to relate to a wide variety of people. He grew up in Queens, which could quickly be heard in his voice, and his family of four had shared a one-bedroom apartment. He and his brother had the bedroom and his parents slept near the foyer on a pullout couch. He was a smart kid but far from an entitled one. His father died when Arthur was fifteen, leaving his mother widowed at thirty-seven. He attended Babson College, just outside of Boston, and graduated in three years. He was a lifelong high achiever and visionary, taking over a franchise that was his opposite.
On the day he was approved by the league and officially took control of the Falcons, he was advised by Patriots owner Robert Kraft that there were many similarities between his previous business and the NFL, but one thing that was not similar was media coverage. It was going to be a new world for him, Kraft warned, so he’d have to prepare for it. Blank listened and invited the Falcons’ head of football communications, Reggie Roberts, to his home to talk.
“It was the first time in my career an owner had reached out to me like that,” says Roberts, who had worked in the league a dozen years before Blank arrived with the Falcons. “We spent more than an hour talking, and he asked a lot of questions about me, as a person, in addition to getting my professional ideas on how we should approach the media. He gave his ideas, but he also listened to mine.”
The presence of Blank improved the work experience for most, but not Reeves. Blank had said he wanted the best of all available things, and that included the best coach and GM, too. Reeves had proved ten times over that he could coach, but the owner didn’t want the head coach to also be in charge of picking the players. It may have been different if Reeves had been exceptional when it came to the draft, simultaneously picking for the present and future, but he wasn’t. So it wasn’t a secret to Reeves or anyone else that Blank was looking for someone to replace part of the job that the head coach had been accustomed to doing.
He first looked to Tampa, whose GM was Rich McKay. The deal broke down when the Buccaneers asked for compensation. But Blank nearly landed an executive superstar a month before the 2002 draft. He reached out to Ron Wolf, who had helped build championship teams in Oakland and Green Bay, and offered him the most lucrative GM contract in the league at the time: $16 million over four years. Wolf, who was sixty-three, turned it down because he wondered if he had the energy and preparation to do the job well.
From Blank’s perspective, searching for a top GM made sense. But the search, the temporary solutions, the near misses, the consultants, and the coaching changes that would follow created a philosophical maze in his scouting department. There would be no true absorbing of the system for the scouts, because just as they would go to sink into it, the rules of the system would change. They’d be going from a 4–3 defense to a 3–4 and back to a 4–3. They’d be told to focus on power backs one day and then change-of-pace backs the next. They needed smaller offensive linemen for one coach’s zone blocking scheme, and suddenly they were looking for three-hundred-plus-pound brutes for another.
The confusion started shortly after the 2002 draft. On draft day, Reeves and Ron Hill shared the thought that they were sitting on a sleeper pick. The Falcons were picking eighteenth, and leading up to the draft, they hadn’t heard a single draftnik or “secret source” whisper that anyone in front of them was thinking of selecting Syracuse pass rusher Dwight Freeney. That was their guy. They’d design special schemes for him in defensive coordinator Wade Phillips’s 3–4, with Freeney’s speed and instincts too much for most offensive linemen to account for. In some ways, he’d be the Vick of their defense. But the Colts, picking eleventh, saw the same talent that Atlanta did and drafted the six-foot defensive end who was supposed to slip in the draft due to his less-than-ideal height. When it was time for the Falcons to pick, their consolation prize was a 250-pound running back named T. J. Duckett.
It turned out that the 2002 draft was Reeves’s last one as a decision-maker. After the draft, the personnel department had to deal with some awkward office politics. Reeves was still the coach, of course, but the man he brought in to help him in personnel, Hill, was now responsible for picking the players. So, theoretically, Hill could draft players and Reeves, as caretaker of the fifty-three-man roster, could cut them. Both men handled the move with grace, although it was obvious the arrangement wouldn’t and couldn’t last. It was no way to build a team, and more important, Blank continued to search for a GM who was going to replace at least one of them, if not both.
On the field, second-year quarterback Vick was becoming everything that Reeves imagined. As traditional as Reeves was in some ways, he had
told his staff early on that they were to adjust to Vick and not the other way around. So at its core, the Falcons’ offense was basic, but the improvisation of Vick made it appear complex. He was a legitimate threat to score each time he tucked the ball away and headed upfield. He hadn’t mastered the nuances of the passing game, but everyone could see the enormity of his talent, so there was excitement and curiosity when he painted outside the lines or acted like he didn’t see lines at all. He was getting away with things on the field that weren’t supposed to be possible in the NFL, or with the laws of gravity, from making defenders grasp at air because they thought they had him to flicking a pass sixty yards without so much as a grunt.
The team’s season highlight came in the play-offs when the Falcons traveled to Green Bay. Vick was a Pro Bowler, and his nearly eight hundred yards rushing got him more respect as a runner than a passer. On a 20-degree Wisconsin night, he did just enough of both as Atlanta jumped to a 24–0 halftime lead. The final was 27–7, a victory convincing enough to make you believe in illusions. It appeared that Vick had grown up and the Falcons had turned a corner, and neither was true.
The problem wasn’t just a loss the next week in Philadelphia in the divisional round. It was about team-building, from expecting accountability of leaders, such as Vick, to coming up with something more than a Top 40 music roster, good for today but ultimately not good enough to be timeless. What the Falcons needed was a system, a program. Yet the last major act of the Reeves-Hill administration was a shortsighted trade: The Falcons gave up their first-round pick, number 23 overall, for Buffalo Bills receiver Peerless Price. They projected him as a number one receiver and gave him a fat contract to match. It was the type of deal that most smart franchises agonized over before making, if they made it at all. The superficial logic was that no player of that caliber would be available for the Falcons at spot 23, a line of thinking that didn’t factor in a team’s ability to either trade the pick up, down, or away for future picks. Nor did it acknowledge cost control. Pick 23, which turned out to be running back Willis McGahee, got a contract that could have been worth $15 million in total, with incentives, but included just $4 million in actual guarantees. With a $10 million signing bonus alone, the Falcons had guaranteed Price more than twice McGahee’s compensation.
War Room Page 16
