Report: Falcons have known they were firing head coach and general manager for weeks

Apparently, I needn’t have worried that the Falcons were going to let the last few weeks of the season influence whether they kept Raheem Morris and Terry Fontenot. Per NFL insider Ollie Connolly, who in my experience has been pretty accurate in his reporting, Atlanta has “had feelers” out to potential candidates for weeks now and were going to fire both Morris and Fontenot regardless of the season’s end result.

Per Connolly, Arthur Blank was unhappy about the structure sold to him during the team’s pursuit of Bill Belichick, with the team ultimately keeping Fontenot and hiring Morris instead of Belichick. It’s hard for me to argue that Belichick would have been any better—the fiasco of a first year in college at North Carolina suggests it would have been interesting but not particularly fruitful—but Blank made his decision with the hope that it would lead to wins right away. That’s not what happened.

Further, Connolly suggests that sources he’s spoken with indicate the Falcons have a preferred head coaching candidate in mind already, even though they’ll go through an array of interviews. The team will certainly check all the necessary boxes in their search and could always pivot, much like they did the last time out, and will not do anything that might run afoul of the league’s Rooney rules.

Given how muddy the reporting around Atlanta has been, you can take some or all of this with a grain of salt if you like; certainly the fact that insiders suggested Morris could be safe only to turn around and report his firing a day or two later tells you the Falcons have done a good job keeping a lid on their plans. But it would certainly fit with the team’s decision to fire both Morris and Fontenot despite the strong finish to the season, something that swayed Arthur Blank in the waning Dan Quinn/Thomas Dimitroff days of 2019 and 2020, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Falcons might have a candidate in mind. You don’t generally fire a head coach without some idea of who you’d like to go after, after all.

We also do know that it looks increasingly likely Matt Ryan will be involved in both the general manager and head coach search. We know from the team’s firing announcement that Sportology, the firm they reportedly brought on to look at their football operations, will be involved with the general manager search. ZRG Partners will apparently be involved with the head coaching search, meaning there will be separate outside firms involved in both. The team’s order of operations will be interesting to watch here, as they could hire a big name head coach earlier than a general manager if the GM is set to report up to Ryan, or go back to a more traditional route and get a GM in who has a say in who is hired. We’ll start getting a better sense of the timeline soon.

We’ll start compiling lists of potential general manager and head coach candidates this week, but don’t be shocked if some interviews are announced before we even get there. The groundwork the Falcons have laid over the past few weeks has clearly been in service of enabling them to move fast, and I expect them to do so, especially if there’s a coach already at the top of their list.