Sunlight is a great disinfectant, as the saying goes, and in the harsh light of the morning a great many truths can be seen. The Atlanta Falcons have been hesitant to let that light in, given that in the darkness they’ve been mired in, slumbering shadows of the past and the dancing shadows of what might be have mingled in a way that has proved enthralling.
But the fact is that this team is at yet another point where they must either embrace what the light might reveal or continue to lock the shutters, a decision that will determine the course of the franchise for years to come. Very simply, this team must decide if they’re ready to embrace the full-scale rebuild they’ve repeatedly tried to take shortcuts through, or if they really believe they’re close and need to be patient with a squad ready to cap off their eighth straight losing season.
The latter is the more tempting thought. Wasn’t the 2008 Falcons team just a quarterback and a few quality additions away once they added a new head coach and front office? Wasn’t the patience shown with the 2015 squad rewarded in 2016, after young pieces and quality signings had a chance to gel under a great staff? Isn’t this roster, with its potential home run 2025 defensive draft class and handful of genuine stars, a good enough foundation to build on? For an owner who has to be more impatient for success than ever before, these whispers will turn to cacophony in the coming weeks. We can only wait to see whether he indulges them.
There is ample reason to believe he will, of course, because the alternative is painful. The alternative is saying that all the work of the past five years under Terry Fontenot, Arthur Smith, and Raheem Morris has been for very little, and that only a handful of players currently on this roster will be around for the next great Falcons team because it will take time to build that roster
and some of them will need to be moved to acquire the resources necessary to do that building. It would be admitting that the era is lost, the decisions have mostly been wrong, and the Falcons have slowly settled into being the laughingstock they were throughout much of their history. Whether you believe all that is true or not, considering a real teardown figures to be extremely painful for those who were involved in building the Falcons as they exist today.
It means at least hedging against Michael Penix Jr. being the future at quarterback. It means genuinely considering whether Kyle Pitts, Drake London, and even Bijan Robinson are going to be Falcons for the long haul. It means potentially blowing up the hard-fought gains at inside linebacker, cornerback, and safety in the service of getting cap space, picks, and opening spots for younger players to shine. It means confronting a world where all the defiance that has characterized the last decade of decision-making has to evaporate, and there’s no guarantee all that work will even pay off. There’s a reason humanity loves a shortcut; when you can’t be sure something’s going to work, it’s easy to talk yourself into believing your own genius makes you an exception to the long slog that otherwise awaits you. Haven’t you worked hard enough? Wouldn’t it have worked if not for a few unforeseen mistakes and unlucky bounces?
Last month,
I wrote about the team’s failure to understand their present moment over and over again from 2018 to present, but I think the root of the lack of appetite for a rebuild goes back a lot further than that. It’s worth noting that when Arthur Blank bought the Falcons in 2002, they had a great coach in the twilight of his career in Dan Reeves, an exciting young franchise icon in Michael Vick, and a quality roster that saw them make playoff pushes in two out of his first three years at the helm. The team muddled through three lousy years from 2005-2007 and cycled coaches, with Mike Smith and Thomas Dimitroff arriving with the expectation that it might take time to build back up from Rich McKay’s shaky late tenure as general manager, the loss of Vick, and Bobby Petrino’s cowardly flight in 2007.
And this is one of two spots where Blank, however willing he might have been to sign up for a slow burn rebuild at the time, did not end up having to. Matt Ryan was better than we had any right to expect right away, Roddy White blossomed into a top-flight receiver, and Smitty turned out to be the right coach for the moment as the Falcons unexpectedly went to the playoffs in 2008. They’d reel off five straight winning seasons before 2013 and 2014’s crash, which brought Dan Quinn in to preside over a roster that had aged and seen too many bad decisions pile up. After one mediocre season, though, Quinn and Kyle Shanahan had the Falcons in the Super Bowl, following that up with a playoff berth in 2017.
For Blank, who had 15 years under his belt as the owner at this point, the Falcons had never gone more than three seasons without winning. I fundamentally believe that whatever Blank’s intentions might have been over the past eight years, the fact that his franchise was able to rebound so quickly from what seemed to be crushing adversity and mismanagement convinced him that success was closer than it seemed. I recounted all this in my previous article, but suffice to say the last eight years have repeatedly been about the notion that giving
this coach one more year or swinging
this trade or addressing
this position would finally push the Falcons over the hump. Instead, they’re limping toward what’s likely to be their worst finish since 2020.
You can see this in the fundamental DNA of the Falcons going back to Dimitroff. They never, even once, considered what might come after Matt Ryan until their desire to swing a big trade forced them to trade away the franchise icon, and four seasons out they still don’t have his surefire replacement. Instead, in a post-Ryan world, they spent every offseason from 2023-2025 declaring a different guy would be
the guy, only to see it blow up in one way or another. Also, Atlanta has never been a team to trade down and stockpile additional picks to build depth, or even just regularly stay put and take what comes to them, regularly trading up under both Dimitroff and Fontenot to get the
one guy who was going to make a difference for them. They’ve landed some tremendous players doing that, of course, but the number of times a lack of draft picks has shown up in the team’s roster construction woes is not a small number.
Again, this is an organizational ethos, enabled if not directly encouraged by the team’s power brokers over a long enough time span to believe it’s not a fluke or an accident. The Falcons have become so fixated on winning big that they’ve forgotten that glory and championships rarely happen without the painstaking work of building a consistent winner in the first place, with examples all over the league to draw on.
The Rams leapt into the stratosphere with Matthew Stafford but have built and consistently retooled a deep, capable roster both before and arrived he arrived; the 24 picks they used in 2023-2024 alone were almost as many selections (27) as the Falcons have made from 2022-2025. The Lions have thrived with Jared Goff but have only been able to do so because they built a line that could keep a pressure-shy quarterback out of harm’s way, a defense that can wreck games, and a supporting cast that’s among the NFL’s best. The Eagles simply let the draft come to them and routinely hit home runs by not overthinking their picks, the 49ers spend outsized time and draft capital on their depth, and so on, and so forth. Every great team trades up and takes big swings every now and then, but doing so every season has obvious knock-on effects on your ability to weather injuries and adversity properly. After a while, decisions that seem bold begin to look desperate.
What’s at stake this offseason is tangible and a bit terrifying if you’re the Falcons. Keep Raheem Morris and Terry Fontenot on the theory that this injury-marred season was due more to luck and bad bounces than anything they’ve done and you risk finding yourself back in this same situation a year from now, this time coming off nine losing seasons and facing an even more alienated fanbase, with a rebuild just delayed. Take the middle road and clean out the staff while preserving parts of the power structure and trying to find the right hire for
this roster and you risk spinning tires in mediocrity, following a well-trod path with a slightly different supporting cast. Begin the great selloff and truly start over, allowing a new general manager and head coach to set the pace for a rebuild that might take a year, two years, three years, or longer with no guarantee of success while potentially ridding the team of cherished, marketable players and you open up the door to the great unknown. What if that work fails?
I can’t guarantee which path will be the right one, because so much depends on the staff in place, their work to acquire and develop players, and how Falcons already on the roster excel or fail. But I do know that it feels right to be skeptical the Falcons will choose the last path, both because some teams have microwaved seemingly daunting rebuilds by getting the right people in the building very quickly (the Broncos, the Seahawks, the Patriots, the Lions) and because Blank has never seemed willing or able to sign up for that kind of long-term uncertainty. The irony that the team virtually guaranteed it by keeping Dan Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff and then trying to trade for Deshaun Watson is not lost on me, but we can’t be sure that’s the lesson the Falcons will draw from the past eight seasons. They may think the hard work of building this roster up has been done, minus at least a short-term salve at quarterback, and they’re not as far away as it seems. Again.
There are five games left in the 2025 season, which means over a month for this team’s power structure to mull what comes next. There’s no map to success, no concrete clues as to what will get the Falcons back to winning seasons and good feelings, and no guarantee any road taken will be better than another. That makes me believe that we’ll get either one more year of the current regime or a new one that can vow to make sculptures out of the clay already here, rather than a more complete retooling that might take longer to pay off. In the right light, after all, the shadows never really flee.
(@NFLonCBS) 
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