Falcons Not Considering Changes At Head Coach Or GM

Falcons owner Arthur Blank spoke to reporters following Sunday’s blowout loss to the Buccaneers regarding the status of head coach Mike Smith and GM Thomas Dimitroff beyond this season.

According to Blank, there will not be any changes this offseason with regards to the team’s leadership, despite starting the season 2-8.

“We love our head coach and we love our general manager,” said Blank. “We’ll candidily look at everybody honestly, critically and see what we have to do. It should be nobody that escapes that critique. That’s their job and I have confidence that they’ll do it. They are doing it and they will do it.”

Blank was asked whether or not he still has confidence in Dimitroff and Smith.

“I do. I absolutely, do. They’ve earned it over the last five years. This is a tough business. We’ve had a lot of injuries and there have been a lot of issues on top of the injuries and that is pretty obvious. The guys are proven leaders and proven by success. Their records speak for themselves. They’ll do the work that has to be done with my full support. We’ll get back to what we have to do. right now, we have six more games that we have to play this year and we plan on competing hard in those games, winning if not all, as many as we can.”

There is no question that these two share some of the blame for the Falcons horrible season, but it’s not as though they haven’t accomplished a lot in the past five years and some of the most successful franchises are the ones who maintain leadership continuity over a period of time. The biggest knock on Dimitroff and Smith, in my opinion, is the lack of depth that’s found on this roster. Every team deals with injuries, but it only took a couple of key injuries to turn them into one of the worst teams in the league. They need to draft and develop a lot better moving forward to prevent this kind of slide in the coming years should something go wrong.