Falcons’ Arthur Blank has become bad franchise owner

I keep hearing that Arthur Blank is a good NFL franchise owner. Teams with good owners win consistently. Blank’s Falcons have been losing for a long time. That’s the sign of a bad owner.

The Falcons lost 37-9 to the Seahawks on Sunday to secure their eighth consecutive losing season. That ties a franchise record set from 1983-1990. The Falcons were owned by the Smith family back then. Those days are not fondly remembered around here, and neither will the past eight years of Blank’s stewardship of the team.

Really, you can go back 12 years. It depends on how you feel about the seasons that ended with a historic Super Bowl collapse in Houston and the first-and-goal failure in Philadelphia.

The 2016 and 2017 seasons are the only two winning campaigns for the Falcons since 2012.

“Our fan base deserves a winner,” Falcons coach Raheem Morris said as his team gave them another loser.

Blank hired Morris before last season to stop the slide. He’s 12-18. The loss to the Seahawks officially eliminated the Falcons from the playoffs. I buried them a month ago when they blew the game against the Colts in Berlin.

It seems the fans have seen enough of this team. There were lots of empty seats at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday. The Falcons fans who stuck around were booing their team by the end.

Who can blame them? Blank has been offering them a bad on-field product for a long time.

The Falcons have a 90-119 record from 2013 to now. Only eight of the NFL’s 32 teams have done worse: Jaguars, Jets, Browns, Giants, Raiders, Commanders, Bears and Titans. Those franchises are often punch lines. The Falcons have been a joke for most of the past 13 years.

There was hope of a turnaround before last season. The Falcons raised their season ticket prices. Fans responded by buying them all up for the first time in nearly two decades. The Falcons finished 8-9 in 2024 as $100 million quarterback Kirk Cousins ended up benched.

There was renewed hope this season with Michael Penix Jr. The Falcons were 3-6 when he suffered a season-ending ACL injury last month. It could be a year before he can play again.

The Falcons had a chance to earn a quality victory in a lost season on Sunday. They squandered that opportunity because of mistakes by what are surely the worst special teams units in the NFL.

The game was tied at halftime. The momentum shifted to Seattle for good once Rashid Shaheed ran back the opening kickoff of the second half for a 100-yard touchdown. That’s the fifth kickoff return of 49 yards or more allowed by the Falcons this season.

Rasheed’s touchdown opened the floodgates for Falcons failures. The Seahawks scored the next 10 points off turnovers.

Marquice Williams is the special teams coordinator, but Morris ultimately is responsible for the performance of those units. There is no indication that he knows how to fix the problems, which are a big reason why the Falcons have faltered in close games this season.

That’s the story of this Falcons year. It’s a small part of the big picture. The buck stops with Blank, whose fingerprints are all over the failures.

Blank hired Morris and his predecessor, Arthur Smith. Blank let Dan Quinn stay long after the magic had worn off. Blank allowed Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff to sink the team’s salary cap as the losses piled up.

Blank could have tried to sign two-time league MVP Lamar Jackson but declined to break free from his peers. Blank approved the signing of Cousins, who is now the highest-paid backup in NFL history. Blank cosigned the plan to draft Penix, who suffered two season-ending ACL injuries to his other knee in college.

Blank inherited a good situation when he bought the Falcons in February 2002. The franchise already had a successful coach and future quarterback in place.

Dan Reeves had won three AFC championships with the Broncos and one NFC title with the Falcons. Reeves drafted quarterback Michael Vick in 2001. The 2002 Falcons became the first visiting team to win a playoff game at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field before losing at Philadelphia in the divisional round.

Vick and Reeves’ successor, Jim Mora, made it to the 2004 NFC championship game. The promise of Vick leading the Falcons to better things collapsed when he pleaded guilty to federal dogfighting charges in 2007. The coach Blank had hired to work with Vick, Bobby Petrino, quit before the season was over.

Credit Blank for hiring Mike Smith to succeed Petrino, and general manager Thomas Dimitroff to replace Rich McKay. Dimitroff drafted future Hall of Fame players Matt Ryan and Julio Jones. Smith guided the Falcons to the playoffs in four of the next five seasons with a high mark of the 2012 NFC title game.

Blank kept Smith after a 4-12 season in 2013. He fired him after a 6-10 finish in 2014 but retained Dimitroff. Blank hired Dan Quinn to succeed Smith. The Quinn/Dimitroff pairing produced one NFC championship (marred by the blown 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl) and one divisional playoff appearance (marred by the inability to score the game-winning touchdown).

Like he’d done with Mike Smith, Blank ended up showing too much loyalty to Quinn and Dimitroff for their past successes. It took three consecutive losing seasons before Blank fired the pair. Blank’s next coach, Arthur Smith, couldn’t do any better. He was let go after three losing seasons in a row.

After Blank fired Smith, he was asked how fans can be confident he’ll get the next hire right when the Falcons have been losers for so long. Blank said his job was to “surround myself with the very best people like (CEO) Rich McKay, (general manager) Terry Fontenot, great coaches, the whole organization.”

Said Blank: “We’ve got a world-class, first-class organization and I think they’ll bring the very best thinking and the most objective thinking. Everybody is trying to listen and learn, and understand and reflect, and come up with a better set of answers where we can.”

Blank still doesn’t have the answers. The NFL is engineered for bad teams to become good. The Falcons have bucked the system by staying bad no matter who Blank puts in charge of football operations.