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Monday, January 1, 2007
Next guy needs to scare, not hug, players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Flowery Branch — During his tenure as owner, Arthur Blank has operated on the misguided assumption that when you treat people well, pay them well, and make it clear in almost every way possible that you are emotionally and certainly financially invested in their future, they will respond accordingly.
This season should teach him something.
Blank fired Jim Mora Monday. Before deciding on a replacement, he and president and general manager Rick McKay need to realize that the Falcons’ biggest problems can’t be fixed by a smiling, peppy “consensus” guy with a new book of Xs and Os.
Because in the big picture, the Falcons don’t just need a coach. They need a human cattle prod.
Mora certainly looked like the right choice to take over two years ago. He was high-energy. He coached like his pants were on fire. He gave his players group hugs.
But if collapses the past two seasons have proven anything, it’s that things have gotten way too comfortable at Flowery Branch.
The owner wants to be the players’ pal. The coach wanted to be the players’ pal. Too much pal.
This team needs a head-slap once in a while. This is football. Remember football?
Blank presumably is as demanding as an NFL owner as he was in the retail industry. But between Blank’s generosity — one of the NFL’s highest payroll, wooing free agents on his private jet, new dorms for training camp — and Mora’s daily devotionals about how much he loved his players, the Falcons played like they were wearing bedroom slippers. They lost their edge. They lost something that really should be automatic in professional sports, but, in reality, isn’t: a desire to earn to their paychecks.
The Falcons dressed 45 players a game, but significantly fewer heart beats. Please, no more claims about the great leaders on this roster. Great leaders don’t allow a team to go 2-7 after a 5-2 start. Great leaders don’t get stepped on by Philadelphia backups to close the season. Great leaders don’t throw their coach under the bus, regardless of what they may think of the play-calling.
No matter what you thought about Mora as a coach, it says something about the man that, right to the end, he wouldn’t publicly dump on his players for their heart-less efforts. But maybe somebody needs to be called on the carpet. The Falcons have lacked accountability. If the best head coaches don’t constantly rip their players, they certainly don’t wave pompons every day.
The last thing any Falcons player needed in the second half this season was to think that everything was OK, when it clearly wasn’t. They played with a feeling of acceptance.
Mora wanted to be liked. Coaches don’t have to be liked. Coaches have to be respected. Maybe they even have to be feared. The next coach won’t need a whistle, he’ll need a blowtorch.
Yes, players want to know that a coach has their back. But they also need to believe that they’re one yawn away from being drop-kicked. These players never had that feeling, and it showed.
Blank did not lay out the blueprint for his next coach Monday. But in comparing the criteria for this season to the one that led to Mora’s hiring, he seemed to acknowledge miscues two years ago.
“There will be things that we’ll look at a little differently,” he said.
It’s logical that Michael Vick’s development will be central to the search. Mora and Greg Knapp never could figure out the best way to utilize him. But the Falcons don’t need innovation. They need simplicity. Football in the era of the NFL Network is the same thing it was in the era of leather helmets. It’s blocking and tackling. It’s a physical game and the Falcons are not a physical team.
The Falcons did not lose their final game because Mora and his staff got outschemed. They lost because a bunch of well-paid, coddled athletes were punched in the face and they didn’t punch back. Maybe they forgot how. Maybe they didn’t feel it was worth the effort.
The pitfalls of direct deposit.
The next coach can’t change the salary structure of the NFL. But he can change the attitude, and it starts with a little discomfort. These players need to feel something, and it’s not a warm embrace.
Permalink | Comments (237) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
When team quits, coach must go
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Flowery Branch — He had to go, and for so many reasons. We needn’t go further than that self-inflicted dagger through the heart of Jim Mora’s coaching career with the Falcons. In case you missed the bloody truth in the aftermath of his firing on Monday, his players just quit on him for the second straight year.
To have your players vanish through indifference once is bad enough. Twice, and you definitely have to go.
This is the same Mora who spent three seasons chest-bumping and overly praising everybody in his locker room when he wasn’t snorting ammonia caps with all of them on the sideline. It was enough to make his players often speak of how they loved the guy. Well, they loved the guy so much that they quit on him against Carolina to seal last season’s underwhelming finish, and then they quit on him Sunday in Philadelphia against a bunch of folks at the end of the Eagles’ bench.
So here’s my advice to Falcons owner Arthur Blank and franchise guru Rich McKay during their search for a new head coach: Stay away from “player coaches” because they eventually get assassinated by their players. Falcons players had good reason to do so in this case.
In contrast to that Carolina fiasco, when Falcons quarterback Michael Vick even admitted to yawning through it all, Mora’s players quit on him to end this season because he quit on them with three games left to play. That’s when Mora shamelessly campaigned for the University of Washington job when his players were scrambling down the stretch in search of the playoffs. Not a good way to win friends and influence people who have the power to save your job.
Despite what Falcons players might say, they wanted Mora gone, and you could tell by their listless play, not only against the Eagles, but against the pitiful likes of Detroit and Cleveland and the depleted likes of Carolina. Even if the Falcons had done the unlikely by discovering ways to reach the playoffs with a strikingly flawed roster, Mora was a firing waiting to happen.
There was the football stuff, exemplified by the Falcons’ inability to adjust during games (0-17 when entering the fourth quarter behind, baffling offensive schemes, strange personnel decisions). Then there was all of that other stuff.
Way too much of the other stuff.
You know about some of them. They range from Mora slinging his headset in an ugly tantrum after a postgame question that he didn’t like from a Falcons radio announcer, to ripping franchise legends Mike Kenn and Jeff Van Note for being too quote-friendly (at least in Mora’s mind) during their playing careers. As for the rest of Mora’s explosions, well, there were so many of them that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. Plus, the real ones are too numerous to list in this space.
Translated: He had to go. You also have to consider that Blank is the ultimate czar of image. He likes to boast of bringing the customer-friendly approach that he used during his successful Home Depot days to the Falcons. That said, having a coach who has a habit of being more discussed for his foolishness than for his X’s and O’s isn’t helping you become customer-friendly.
“We’re not going to go through and kind of figure out who shot who and what was said and when it was said,” explained Blank of Mora’s dismissal, and then he quickly added, “This was a very complicated decision for us. It was a variety of factors that came into play. … I simply can’t put a weight on any single one of them. It was a combination of things that kind of brought us to this point.”
A combination of things? That’s the understatement of the year — this one and the previous one.
Permalink | Comments (145) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Diminishing returns doomed Mora
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Jim Mora got hired because he had Plan A. He got fired because he didn’t have Plan B.
Arthur Blank and Rich McKay hired Mora over Lovie Smith and Tim Lewis and Romeo Crennel — and even over the last-minute possibility of Nick Saban — because Mora trotted out his playbook and impressed the brass with his impending choice of coordinators. (Meaning Greg Knapp, if you can believe that now.) Mora was, in the minds of Blank and McKay, simply better-prepared than the other career assistants they interviewed.
And that part was true. Mora indeed won bigger faster than Smith — granted, Mora inherited a much better roster — and was invariably quick off the mark. The Falcons were 6-2, 6-2 and 5-3 in the first halves of Mora’s three years, a winning percentage (.708) which, had it extended over full seasons, would have exceeded Don Shula’s.
Alas, the Falcons were 9-15 over the second halves of Mora’s regular seasons, and it became apparent why. Mora was fine so long as everything broke right, but everything never breaks right for long. Andy Reid has proved in Philadelphia he can win with any quarterback. Mora proved he didn’t know quite what to make of the most talented quarterback in the NFL. (And it wasn’t as if Michael Vick, whose injury in 2003 cost Dan Reeves his job, was lost to Mora for long. Vick has missed two starts in three years.)
Great coaches adjust. Mora’s teams tinkered — some games they’d throw a lot, others scarcely at all — but never established a forceful signature. They were usually OK if they could run the ball and nurse a lead, but they were hopeless if they couldn’t. The Falcons under Mora won one game (against San Diego on Oct. 17, 2004) when trailing after three quarters. This in a league built for comebacks. This with the incomparable Vick.
The Falcons under Mora were always one of the NFL’s more gifted assemblages. (They had six Pro Bowlers last season, one more than the Super Bowl champion Steelers.) But not since Mora’s first season did the Falcons beat a team that would win as many as 10 games or qualify for the playoffs. Their talent enabled them to feed on minnows, but when matched against an opponent of comparable worth they were undone by their coaching.
The nice part about working for Blank is that he’ll spend whatever it takes to accumulate resources. The catch is that Blank expects performance commensurate with his outlay, and not since 2004 has he gotten them. The last two seasons proved Mora, in whose hiring Blank invested no small amount of political capital, was overmatched as a tactician and also something of a brat.
His bizarre I’m-a-Husky-at-heart radio interview seemed tantamount to insubordination, and his inability to rally a team going wrong stamped him as a coach for fair weather only. And through the prism of distance Mora’s one big season can be viewed as a slightly lesser achievement. The Falcons trampled through a weak division and made the NFC title game by trashing St. Louis, which had finished a demonstrably middling 8-8, in the playoffs.
Ultimately an owner has to ask: Are we losing because we don’t have the players or because those players are being misdirected? This was an easy call. There was no reason for this offense — No. 1 in rushing, No. 32 in passing — to be so imbalanced. There was no reason to keep falling behind 14-0 at home. There was no reason not to make the playoffs last year or this.
In the end there were a hundred reasons not to keep Mora. This team is too skilled and this owner too committed to settle for steadily diminishing returns. This coach stepped into a prime situation, but the longer he worked the clearer it became that more Mora would yield only less. He needed to go. He needs to go dazzle some other prospective employer with his preparation and charm and wit.
Permalink | Comments (402) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
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