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Saturday, December 9, 2006
Coaching change killed Vick’s development
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
No question that Dan Reeves is the Falcons’ Harry Truman. In other words, the former NFL coaching standout continues to look better with time. “I’m not old enough to remember Harry Truman,” said Reeves, 62, chuckling, from his Buckhead home, before he proceeded to remember just about everything else.
Take, for instance, Reeves’ prediction three years ago of stagnation (or worse) for Michael Vick.
The prediction came near the end of the Falcons’ ugly 2003 season, when Reeves was fired. It didn’t matter that the Falcons mostly imploded because of Vick’s broken leg during the preseason. Never mind that the Falcons spent the previous year pulling their Miracle at Green Bay during the playoffs. Or that Reeves led the franchise to its only Super Bowl. Or that he ranks among just six NFL coaches in history with more than 200 victories.
Reeves was outta here. To which he recalled telling Arthur Blank, the Falcons’ new owner at the time, that Vick would suffer the most. “I just felt like he was making a lot of progress and that he was going to be really good, but when Arthur made the decision [to fire me], I told him that it was going to set [Vick] back. I said, ‘You just can’t bring people in with different systems, because it’s going to take time for him to adjust.’ Except for the injury that he suffered, I thought he was progressing pretty well.”
Actually, Vick was progressing extremely well. He even used the momentum from his Reeves days to reach the NFC championship game during the first year of the Jim Mora regime. In fact, 20 of the Falcons’ 22 starters in that championship game were acquired by the Reeves regime. But this is primarily about Vick, a six-year veteran, whose best season came in 2002 during his last full year under Reeves. That was when Vick finished with his highest passer rating (81.6 compared to his current 74.5), had his most passing yards (2,936 compared to his current 1,892 with four games to go) and managed his fewest interceptions (eight compared to his current nine).
Unlike now, Reeves allowed Vick to audible more than once every presidential election year. “Everybody’s different, and it sounds like [Falcons offensive coordinator] Greg Knapp, even when he had Steve Young, his system just doesn’t have the ability to audible. When we had [Vick], we tried to make it where he could adjust. It made your game plan simpler at times, but he did a good job, and we gave him the chance to get out of bad plays.”
Not only that, Reeves helped Vick as a player and as a person with the hiring of a speech coach to smooth out his many rough edges. “He was maturing,” said Reeves, and the way things were going, you had the feeling that the only time Vick would point a finger at the home crowd would be to signal that the Falcons were No. 1. Instead, Vick flashed an obscene gesture last month inside the Georgia Dome toward booing fans after a loss. Said Reeves, “I hated to see it, and he did, too, because he’s not that person. He’s not a confrontational person.”
Neither is Vick “a coach killer,” said Reeves, referring to the older Jim Mora, who agreed when the co-host of his former radio show used that phrase. Added Reeves, “A coach killer is somebody who doesn’t cooperate and tries to back-stab you, and that’s not Mike Vick, and anybody around him knows he’s not that.”
If you haven’t guessed, Reeves still cherishes the guy that he made the first pick overall of the 2001 NFL draft. The old coach works these days as a color analyst on radio for Westwood One, and he studied Vick up close and personal two games ago during the Falcons’ stinging loss to the rival New Orleans Saints. “I didn’t see any separations between receivers and defensive backs for him to throw to,” Reeves said. “To really tell whether Mike’s progressing or not, there’s a lot of things involved. You have to be there every day and determine if he’s doing the things that you’ve asked him to do.”
Vick did those things under Reeves. So did many others.
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