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Thursday, January 24, 2008
Falcons go back to football fundamentals
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — Fundamentals aren’t fun. Truth to tell, they’re boring. But they exist for a reason: They work. And when you’ve bottomed out, the only proven way to pull yourself up is to embrace the basic.
The Falcons just hired a coach whose stated philosophy of football is to run the ball and stop the run. That sounds dull as all get-out, but right about now, this organization could use all the dullness it can find. It has tried the glib (Jim Mora) and the guileful (Bobby what’s-his-name), and here it sits, introducing its third new coach in 48 months.
The new man is Mike Smith. He answers to Smitty. (Sometimes, his wife conceded, she even calls him Smitty.) He’s a 26-year career assistant who once, to make ends meet between stops, grew Christmas trees in Irwin, Tenn. Can’t get any less artificial than that.
The new man describes himself as “a systems guy,” and that’s precisely what this careening organization requires. The Falcons have invested heavily in personalities, only to be betrayed at every turn. They need a baseline set of tenets. They need a guy whose burning ambition isn’t to coach the Washington Huskies or to run after every open job. They need a man who sees, to quote Mike Smith, the imperative “to focus on the task at hand.”
His task: To coach up a team that has been beaten down and, in so doing, bring order to chaos. And having a system, having core beliefs, is always the way to begin.
Mike Smith isn’t a big name or an outsized personality. He’s a football coach. He doesn’t bring the sizzle that would have accompanied the offensive man from Dallas — “Obviously we made the offer to Jason [Garrett],” said Thomas Dimitroff, the new general manager — but how excited were Packers fans in 2006 on the day Mike McCarthy was named head coach? How pleased are they today? Winning can come in different forms, but at bottom winning is always based on the fundamental.
There is about Smith a refreshing lack of pretense. When you’ve gone from living in San Diego to residing in Morehead, Ky. — “culture shock,” Smith said — due to the inherent vagaries of coaching football, you’ve looked at life from both sides now. He doesn’t come across as entitled (unlike, say, Mora) or egomaniacal (unlike, say, what’s-his-name). He comes across as a guy who has a job to do and has done it long enough to know what works.
And here’s the nicest part: What has worked for Smith is what the GM, newly imported from New England, believes will work anywhere. “Control both lines of scrimmage,” Dimitroff said. “That’s Bill’s philosophy [meaning Belichick] about the defensive line: Keep the stall full.”
Dimitroff is a personnel man. The chief reason he warmed to Smith is because this coach shares an affinity for personnel matters. “You can’t force-feed a coach,” Dimitroff said. “If he’s not fully invested in choosing personnel, you wind up being at loggerheads.”
Make no mistake: Smith is Dimitroff’s man. He recommended that Smith be offered the job, and Arthur Blank approved. (And Dimitroff saw no need to wait for an audience with Steve Spagnuolo.) The freshly minted GM introduced Smith to the media Thursday, a telling bit of symbolism. For his part, Blank seemed content to say relatively little.
Smith is a solid hire, a welcome addition to an organization that has been treading in shifting sand. Said Dimitroff: “What Mike brings to the table is stability and consistency to a team that needs those things.”
The belief here, though, is that the key to this offseason, the key to the Falcons’ whole future, wasn’t so much the coach as the GM. The way Dimitroff handled this first mission — calmly, methodically, fundamentally — suggests that an organization gone wrong is again, at long and blessed last, going right.
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Falcons shouldn’t feel embarrassed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The word “embarrassing” has been tossed around rather loosely regarding the Falcons’ search for new leadership. So here’s what I want to know:
Was it embarrassing to approach Bill Cowher, who won a Super Bowl with Pittsburgh?
Was it embarrassing to approach Bill Parcells, who won two Super Bowls with New York?
Was it embarrassing to approach Jason Garrett, the assistant everybody wants?
Was it embarrassing to sound out Pete Carroll, who might not have been a fit here but who clearly knows something about football?
Was it embarrassing to wind up with a general manager who apprenticed in the league’s finest organization and a head coach who coordinated a terrific defense in Jacksonville?
The Falcons, it says here, spoke with most of the right people. (I don’t understand why Marty Schottenheimer and Floyd Reese weren’t interviewed, but I can appreciate the desire to import newer blood.) They got used by Parcells, which has happened to teams - this one included - before and will doubtless happen again, but had he said yes this organization would have received an instant infusion of credibility. And he did, it must be noted, say yes to Miami.
The only truly embarrassing part was the way it was revealed, at the end of a post-Parcells press release, that Rich McKay had been kicked upstairs. There mightn’t have been a good way of breaking the news, but there had to be a better way than that.
Once McKay had been defrocked as general manager, there was no way this two-pronged process was even going to be without palpitations. But here, after all’s done and too much has been said, is the bottom line:
The Falcons today have a more astute personnel man as GM and a more stable individual (surely!) as coach than they’ve had since 2003. If that’s an embarrassing outcome, we should all be so abashed.
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