CHARLOTTE – Arthur Smith seems like a good man.
Among other qualities, his players like him, he’s an intelligent and thoughtful person and he treats media with patience and respect even as he’s been increasingly questioned for his decisions and the lack of progress in his regime.
“I think Art is a phenomenal coach,” defensive lineman Calais Campbell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday after the latest disaster, a 9-7 last-second loss to Carolina Sunday at Bank of America Stadium.
In the Falcons locker room, maybe no one owns more credibility than Campbell, a 16-year veteran who has won the NFL Man of the Year Award and also been named the league’s defensive player of the year.
“He’s about getting better, improving, just work the situations, work the craft and I think motivating, getting guys to play hard for him,” Campbell said. “I’m a big fan of him as the coach.”
That can all be true. But it doesn’t necessarily make him the right person to lead the Falcons. In a season that was supposed to be a breakthrough, that started with such optimism in his positionless football offense and array of skill players, Smith has week by week provided less and less reason for owner Arthur Blank to keep him as his coach for a fourth season.
On a cold and rainy afternoon, seven days after a crushing home loss to Tampa Bay, the Falcons found a way to lose to the worst team in the NFL to fall to 6-8 and reduce their playoff hopes to smoke and vapors. One defensive stop away from taking control of the NFC South a week ago, the Falcons are now only barely in the playoff chase.
And this is against one of the weakest schedules in the NFL, a slate that was practically begging for the Falcons to post a winning record and earn their first playoff berth since 2017. The Falcons’ six wins are against teams that, prior to the weekend, had a combined record of 31-47. Only one team (Houston at 7-6) had a winning record. Worse, six of the eight losses were to teams (Arizona, Carolina, New Orleans, Tampa Bay, Tennessee and Washington) with a combined 25-53 record.
After the game, I asked Smith on what basis he believed he was the right coach for the Falcons. This was his full answer:
“I think in any job you take, you’ve got to have self-belief. There’s a cycle of it. There are consequences when you lose. There are natural questions. NFL 101. Job is to win games. There’s a lot of things….every situation is different…There are a lot of things we’ve dealt with early on. But ultimately, the job is to win games and get into the playoffs. We’ll still have that opportunity. It looks like a longshot, but each one of these years have been different. We’ve had three different teams. Different movement at some critical spots. At the end of the day, your job is to win. But I’ve got a ton of self-belief. Nobody should take a job that they don’t have belief in themselves, I can promise you that.”
Self-confidence is great, but not a compelling reason to keep someone in a job in which he has fallen short of expectations. And the team has a chance at the playoffs largely because they’re in the worst division in the NFL.
As is his custom, Blank attended Smith’s news conference. He did not look up much at Smith as he spoke at the podium. Perhaps Blank, who knows Smith and the team at a far greater depth than anyone outside the organization, has no issues with his coach. But the opposite seems a lot more likely.
After Smith’s news conference, I asked Blank if he had a minute. He respectfully declined, saying “This is not a good time (to talk).”
Read into it what you will, but he didn’t say “Arthur Smith has my full confidence” when that answer would have put to rest any questions about his future.
Even as team leaders offered their endorsements of Smith – left tackle Jake Matthews called him “a tremendous leader” – their comments about how the team is close to getting it together indicted him at the same time.
“Our two-minute drill (on defense), we’ve got to work it,” Campbell said. “We have to continue to work it because that’s what we can be a lot better at, I think this whole season. How many times have we had the lead within the two-minute warning and end up giving it up? (Sunday), last week, Minnesota, there’s a bunch of them.”
“We’ve just got to find a way to finish and try to seal the deal at the end of games,” Matthews said. “Because we’re in position most of the time.”
“I’ve seen the work that guys have been putting in and I see how dominant we are in stretches in the game,” linebacker Kaden Ellis said. “Why there are the lapses, we’re going to continue to find that out and, at the end of the day, what we need to do is go out and get this next win.”
This was a game that players tried to approach with the win-or-else mentality of a playoff game. They carried the extra motivation (as if any more were needed) of losing at home to Tampa Bay last week in a game they acknowledged that they should have won. And, again, they were playing a team that was 1-12, on a six-game losing streak, eliminated from playoff contention and playing for an interim coach.
And yet, the Falcons lost by making the same mistakes that have undercut them the whole year – turnovers, untimely penalties and an inability to stop the opposing offense when the game was on the line.
If they weren’t able to be at their best under Sunday’s circumstances – or, worse, if that was their best – then what reason is there to think that anything will improve in a material way with Smith in charge?
Smith may have players’ back and be effective at motivation and development, but if they can’t correct the mistakes that have dogged them all season and factored heavily into repeated losses, who is accountable for that failure but him?
Further, in the end, the goal isn’t just to make the playoffs. It’s to win the Super Bowl. Even if the Falcons were to win the next three games to finish at 9-8 – and even if that somehow got them into the playoffs – would that really be confirmation that Smith is the right coach?
Consider the following. Of the 27 coaches who have led teams to the past 20 Super Bowls, 26 have done one or more of the following – win at least 11 games in at least one season, lead his team to a conference championship game or have back-to-back playoff seasons. The 27th wasn’t exactly a slouch and brought far more credibility to the job than Smith. After winning a Super Bowl with Green Bay, Mike Holmgren had two 9-7 seasons in his first three years in Seattle, leading the Seahawks to the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade in his first season.
They’re somewhat arbitrary standards, but they point to the idea that, after three seasons, a coach will typically demonstrate on the field that his team is going in the right direction. Smith can only hit one of the markers – take the Falcons to the NFC title game – but it seems highly unlikely. Their chances to make the postseason likely require them to do something they haven’t done once in his tenure – win three games in a row – and then get help.
So, it would seem, either Smith isn’t the right guy or he is a unicorn unlike every coach in the past 20 Super Bowls.
Blank has a tough decision to make at some point over the next month. Hiring his seventh coach probably doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for him.
Indeed, this is not a good time.
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