Rejoice: These aren’t your father’s Falcons

By Mark Bradley |

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley

We have to get past this. We have to stop expecting the Falcons to trip over themselves because they’re the Falcons and they’ve always tripped over themselves. Because these are not the Falcons we came to know and scorn. These Falcons are different. They’re smarter and more resourceful than they’ve ever been.

These aren’t the Falcons of the Smith family and Rankin Sr.’s infamous “plateau.” These aren’t the Falcons of Glanville and his gimmicks. These aren’t even the Falcons of Reeves who followed an NFC championship by cutting Cornelius Bennett and Tony Martin and drafting Reggie Kelly. This is a sleek new operation capable of going from strength to strength in a way the Falcons, who have worked 39 years without fashioning consecutive winning seasons, never have.

The four most important roles in any NFL franchise are that of the owner, the general manager, the head coach and the starting quarterback. The Falcons’ front four — Blank, McKay, Mora and Vick — can stand with any. Sure, there’s always the possibility that No. 7 will get hurt, but Rich McKay isn’t apt to sprain his brain anytime soon.

The old Falcons were always held back by failures of leadership. There will be none of those under this regime. The team can and will lose games, sure, but the Falcons won’t flail simply because they’ve failed to foresee developments and permutations. The guys in charge now think of everything, and being clever can take a football team a long way. Witness the New England Patriots, Super Bowl champs three times in four seasons without a truly transcendent talent on their roster.

Of the four principal Falcons, the key man is McKay. Arthur Blank is more impetuous than we’ve been led to believe — ask Falcons staff about his Monday morning e-mails — and Jim Mora is, as we know, his father’s son. McKay stands as the buffer between these two passionate men, the calm voice saying, “Let’s not overreact.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Falcons spent 39 years waxing and mostly waning because they could never find a Rich McKay for the front office. They have one now.

It was McKay, you’ll recall, who was so impressed by Mora’s attention to detail that he recommended the rather anonymous defensive coordinator above a handful of bigger names. And while it’s true Mora has an edge to him — or, to use a more dated term, a temper — he’s circumspect enough to see beyond his own ego. The most impressive hire the new head coach made wasn’t Ed Donatell or even Alex Gibbs; it was Joe DeCamillis, who could easily have been out of a job just because he happens to be Dan Reeves’ son-in-law. But Mora, recognizing talent, moved to keep the NFL’s best special teams coach.

That’s the sort of thing the old Falcons would never have done. (When in doubt, the old Falcons’ most creative notion was to hire Marion Campbell again.) The neo-Falcons are problem-solvers, not morass-deepeners. The Falcons had a nice defense last season but felt they needed more speed, so they signed Ed Hartwell to ramp up the velocity quotient at linebacker. That wasn’t a splashy move — Hartwell hasn’t yet played in a Pro Bowl — but it could be the move that elevates the team that just played for the NFC title to the 2005 NFC title.

Yes, the schedule is tougher, and yes, teams that win a lot of close games one year — of the 2004 Falcons’ 11 regular-season victories, six were by less than a touchdown — tend to lose close games the next. The old Falcons were fully capable of going from 14-2 to 5-11. The new Falcons will not. This team will be even stronger the second time around.

Might as well get used to it. The franchise that could only spawn one-year wonders is about to start winning every single year.