A week after Roddy White told ESPN, “We know it’s now Super Bowl or bust,” the man who has built the Atlanta Falcons sat in an office at team headquarters and offered a strong rebuttal.
“It’s absolutely not ‘Super Bowl or bust,’” general manager Thomas Dimitroff said Thursday, speaking after his annual pre-draft media briefing. “We’re in a good position. We’re are encouraged by our growth six years in. Nothing we do comes from the feeling that we’re one piece away.”
The belief that the Falcons stand on the brink of a championship isn’t without merit. They just came within 10 yards of a Super Bowl and since San Francisco linebacker Navorro Bowman either expertly defended or interfered with Matt Ryan’s fourth-down pass to White, the loser in that epic NFC title game has seen Tony Gonzalez decide not to retire and has added big-name free agents Steven Jackson and Osi Umenyiora.
If that flurry of activity buttresses the Super-or-bust notion, other recent doings do not. Would a team gearing up for one big push release starting defenders John Abraham and Dunta Robinson and starting right tackle Tyson Clabo? (Shedding tailback Michael Turner was a no-brainer; he had nothing left.) Would it have allowed cornerback Brent Grimes to leave as a free agent? Wouldn’t a last stand entail — sorry for the cliché overload — a circling of all familiar wagons?
There’s now a buzz, spurred by a Tweet from Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, that the Falcons are working to move up in Round 1 of this week’s draft. Such an effort could be construed as a further indication that this team is anxious if not desperate.
Please know this: The Falcons might well trade upward, but they aren’t desperate. They want very much to win the Super Bowl, but the greater aim is as it has been since Dimitroff and Mike Smith arrived in January 2008 — to reach not just one Super Bowl but several.
“We are always thinking about the long-term,” Dimitroff said. “We’re very fortunate to have a head coach who thinks in those terms.”
Also know this: Of the major sports, pro football is the least suited to reward a now-or-never mentality. The NFL has a hard salary cap, which means a team cannot buy all available assets the way the Yankees do in cap-less major league baseball, and a team cannot collect a handful of stars and pay a luxury tax the way the Lakers just did in the soft-cap NBA.
The NFL is a game of constant roster overhaul. (It helps that most NFL contracts aren’t guaranteed.) Dimitroff described roster-building not as a puzzle — “Puzzles are nice and neat,” he said — but as a game of chess: “You make moves to set up other moves.”
Many were surprised that Dimitroff cut Clabo, who’d been a Falcon since 2005 and who’d re-upped for five seasons in 2011. But it fell under the heading of moves within moves. The $4.5 million saved by lopping Clabo will surely be applied to Matt Ryan’s in-the-works contract extension and Dimitroff has long been preparing to retool the offensive line. He drafted Garrett Reynolds in Round 5 in 2009, Mike Johnson in Round 3 in 2010, Peter Konz in Round 2 and Lamar Holmes in Round 3 last year. As many as three of the above could start against New Orleans on Sept. 8.
The Falcons believe they’re fully capable of winning the next Super Bowl, but there’s a bigger picture that cannot be ignored. In 2011 Philadelphia loaded up by landing Nnamdi Asomugha, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, Ronnie Brown, Jason Babin and Cullen Jenkins. Vince Young, also imported that offseason, described the Eagles as “a Dream Team.” Two failed seasons later, almost every vestige of the Dream Team class is gone. So is coach Andy Reid.
That’s the part people miss: When you take a Super-Bowl-or-bust stance, you either win big or start over. The Falcons’ more measured approach is to do the one without the other. This organization is far too clever ever to go bust.
Oh, and about the possibility of a draft jump: We shouldn’t expect another Julio Jones leap — trade five picks to move up 21 places — for the simple reason that Dimitroff saw Jones as a once-in-a-decade talent. It’s unlikely that any player in this draft has similarly turned the Falcons’ collective head. If Dimitroff does make a Round 1 move, don’t look for it to be from Pick No. 30 into the top 10. Maybe into the top 20.
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