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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > November > 11
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Smitty’s no Belichick or Parcells, except in results
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mike Smith has silver hair but no silver tongue. His postgame briefings at the Georgia Dome are fascinating for what he doesn’t say. He deals mostly in platitudes, and he leaves the impression of a dutiful assistant who’s afraid of revealing too much lest he offend his boss. And that makes sense, given that his bosses — Arthur Blank and Thomas Dimitroff — are in the room listening.
It also makes sense when you consider that Smith, who’s 49, has never before been a head coach. He’s not accustomed to addressing folks wearing coats and ties. He’s a career assistant who has made a career of dealing with sweaty guys in shoulder pads. And that’s why you don’t really get the full Smitty effect until you see him with his players.
He’s not a hands-off head coach. He’s a yeller and a cajoler, a teacher and a taskmaster. (“Taskmaster” is one of his favorite words.) He doesn’t hold himself above the fray. On the contrary, he enjoys frays.
Put simply, the guy who measures every word with the media speaks the players’ unadorned language. Pete Prisco of CBSsports.com reported that Smith sent the Falcons onto the hallowed Lambeau tundra by saying, “That [expletive] field is 100 yards long and 53 1/2 yards wide just like all the other [same expletive] fields.” Duly informed, Smitty’s men went out and whipped Green Bay’s, er, hindquarters.
There’s none of Belichick’s paranoid genius to this coach, none of Parcells’ raging bluster. He’s just Smitty. (Even his wife calls him Smitty.) But this isn’t to say the players nod benignly and pay him no mind. As the massive Grady Jackson, who has played for enough coaches to know the bad from the good, said Sunday, “It’s a treat to see guys buying in.”
For all the laurels draped on Dimitroff for his personnel decisions, these players would have amounted to nothing had they been entrusted to Elmer Fudd. Instead they were handed to a Real Football Man, one who knows how to relate to working adults as opposed to teenagers on scholarship. (Yes, that was a Bobby Petrino reference.)
When you ask these Falcons when they began to believe in themselves, you get a surprising answer. It wasn’t after Matt Ryan made his first NFL pass a touchdown. It wasn’t when they won in Green Bay. It wasn’t even after those 11 seconds against Chicago. It was, said the center Todd McClure, “in OTAs [organized team activities] and training camp. We thought then we could really be special.”
Why? Partly because of the Dimitroff-driven talent infusion, but mostly because these Falcons gained an instant respect for Smitty and staff. These coaches — Mike Mularkey and Paul Boudreau and Keith Armstrong and Ray Hamilton — know what works in the NFL and what resonates with NFL players. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to win football games; you just have to put talented players in the right positions and persuade them to play hard.
Yes, it sounds so simple as to go without saying. But then you hear the safety Lawyer Milloy, who won a Super Bowl under the scheming Belichick, praise Smith’s rudimentary approach: “He says, ‘Go out and play hard, and more times than not you’ll like the outcome.’ That’s his favorite saying.”
It’s not half as catchy as “Just win, baby,” or even, “Finish the drill,” but the sentiment expressed therein has lifted a lunch-bucket team to 6-3. Which tells us, in a way pretty words never could, that Smitty can flat-out coach.
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