The Falcons are amid a storm of rumors, reports, and sentiments among the national media regarding the search for a new head coach.
Most respected members of the media believe Bill Belichick is the frontrunner for the vacancy, but a recent report from an Atlanta beat writer says the search is wide open.
To complicate matters, there are reports saying the Falcons have come away from interviews impressed with several candidates, including Anthony Weaver, Mike Macdonald, Aaron Glenn, and Ben Johnson. Most recently, a report that the club was very impressed with Bobby Slowik was released today.
In the thick of things, the Falcons are at least publicly putting on the persona of a thorough process. However, there’s internal drama that is certainly complicating the search.
Jeff Schultz recently shed light on Rich McKay’s role within the organization. In short, he was relieved from general manager duties when Thomas Dimitroff and Mike Smith were brought on.
Arthur Blank decided to keep him around for his league ties to get his new stadium built. Eventually, McKay weaseled his way back into football operations with the Arthur Smith and Terry Fontenot regime.
While he isn’t considered an NFL insider, Bill Simmons is adding more fuel to the fire of McKay versus Belichick.
“The Atlanta thing, there’s a lot of buzz going around right now about the Atlanta job, that the executives are there are trying — and I’ve heard this, I’m telling you from so many different people — basically Arthur Blank wants to hire Bill Belichick, and all the front office people in Atlanta don’t want to hire Belichick because it’s like any big company — sport franchises are like microcosms of all big companies,” Simmons said on his podcast, via the New York Post.
“The people that run the franchise, they just want to keep their jobs, they’re in job preservation mode, so they’re like ‘Maybe we hire Raheem Morris.’ Yeah, you hire Raheem Morris, he’s young, you’ll have your job for five more years
“You bring in Belichick — you think Belichick’s going to listen to like [John] McKay’s kid … or [general manager Terry] Fontenot. He’s going to be like, ‘I’m going to do my own thing.’“
Simmons and Schultz aren’t alone either. Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated weighed in on the complex nature of the Falcons organizational structure and McKay’s past with Belichick.
“The relationship that could be key to Belichick landing (or not landing) in Atlanta this week is with Rich McKay. And while we’ll go further back than this in a second, it was a change made a year ago by owner Arthur Blank that set the stage for it. Last January, the Falcons team announced a restructure. McKay moved from president to CEO and was put in charge of the football side. Greg Beadles was named president to lead the business side.
McKay’s role expanded, too, to oversee Blank’s other sports properties. (He also owns the MLS’s Atlanta United.)
That setup, a year later, might need more adjusting, because it’s hard to see Belichick being comfortable with any sort of arrangement where he’s reporting to McKay. Mostly because, well, those two haven’t been on the same page over the years, with the former Patriot coach’s (often open) disdain for the NFL’s competition committee that McKay has long chaired.”
You don’t have to look far to find Belichick’s comments on that group. He’s directed reports to the competition committee in the past, saying they think they “have all the answers.” In 2017, Belichick got specific on what he suspected was their effort to rid the game of kickoffs.
“We want more touchbacks, but is that really solving the problem here as it’s been presented by the competition committee? I think you know how I feel about it,” Belichick said. “We’ll see how smart some of that really is to address the problem that we think is being addressed. It seems like football, we have a pretty good game here. Been that way for a long time. The kicking game is a great part of our game.
“But we have a lot of people that feel like the game has to be changed, so we’ll have to see how all that turns out.”
McKay, of course, has been prominent among those “people” for years, and worked with Belichick confidants Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli in Atlanta, which did little to slow the coach’s skepticism toward the intentions of McKay’s group.
Arthur Blank is clearly enamored with the idea of bringing the architect of The Patriot Way to Atlanta. Belichick isn’t one to dance around the truth, so I imagine discussions were had in the second interview about McKay, Belichick, and Fontenot’s respective roles with the Falcons. What comes of those discussions is yet to be seen, but it’s clear there are internal rifts between the two sides.
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Photographer: Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire
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