The old joke in Atlanta was that if you wanted to get rid of your Falcons tickets, the worst thing you could do was put them on the dashboard of your parked car, windows down, in plain sight for all to see. The car might not be there when you came back to the space, but the tickets certainly would. The Falcons were born in 1966 and immediately developed a reputation: If there was greatness to be had, they’d almost have it. And if you loved them, truly loved them, they’d always find a way to bring a new dimension to something as old as heartbreak.
They could have had one of the all-time greats, Vince Lombardi, as their first head coach but settled instead for one of his assistants, Norb Hecker. Four coaches and twelve years later, the Falcons made their first play-off appearance. But by that time, some fans had begun to refer to owner Rankin Smith and his family as “the Clampetts” after the fictional family of The Beverly Hillbillies. Perception of ownership aside, the Falcons had everyone’s attention in 1980 when they went on a nine-game winning streak, won twelve games, and hosted America’s Team in a divisional play-off game. What luck: They were facing Tom Landry’s Cowboys, but they didn’t have to deal with Roger Staubach, the epitome of fourth-quarter cool. Staubach’s on-field charisma and comebacks allowed Landry to pace the sideline without ever appearing to sweat or adjust his feathered fedora. Staubach’s retirement meant that the new starter was Danny White, who was just as likely to throw an interception as a touchdown pass. The Falcons had the Cowboys down by 10, 27–17, just six and a half minutes away from advancing to their first conference championship game … and they lost, 30–27.
Oh, the Falcons had it all. They slept through the 1980s, missing the play-offs for eight consecutive seasons. In their last home game of the decade, they drew an official crowd of seven-thousand-plus to Atlanta—Fulton County Stadium. The next day, which happened to be Christmas, they were outdrawn by the NBA’s Hawks, who had more than thirteen thousand fans watch them play the Cavaliers. As teams in metro Atlanta achieved success, from national titles in football for the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech to a string of division championships and a World Series title for the Braves, the Falcons changed coaches, uniforms, and stadiums yet managed to remain the same.
They had a coach, Jerry Glanville, whose gimmick was leaving tickets for Elvis. They came up with a gimmick on offense, too, with Coach June Jones’s Run and Shoot. In 1993, they could have simply checked off a contractual box that would have allowed them to match any offer that Deion Sanders received from another team. Sanders was the league’s best cover corner, a rare two-sport athlete who was also a Brave, and always one play away from an interception and a new end-zone dance. But the Falcons didn’t check that box, Sanders became an unrestricted free agent, and he played the next two seasons in San Francisco and Dallas, picking up Super Bowl rings with each team.
No one ever said the Falcons were without talent and smarts, on the field and in the front office. The Smith family hired Dan Reeves in 1997, which brought instant credibility. Reeves had played in the Ice Bowl, which wasn’t just Packers vs. Cowboys; it was Lombardi vs. Landry. He had won a Super Bowl as a player and had taken the Broncos there three times as a head coach. He was supposedly all Landry old-school, wearing a suit and tie on game days when most of his peers were getting by with thoughtless khakis, sneakers, and team-issued pullovers. But he also knew when certain types of old got in the way of doing good business.
As soon as Reeves walked into the Falcons’ offices, he noticed that the computer system was from another era. There was a bizarre operating code, and the system was not Microsoft compatible. He called for an update, revamped the scouting department, and hired Ron Hill, whom he had worked with in Denver, as one of his key personnel men. One year later, the Falcons had the most balanced and dominant team in franchise history. They won fourteen games in the regular season and earned a spot in the conference championship, where they were underdogs to the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings had the highest-scoring offense the league had ever seen, led by two receivers ticketed for the Hall of Fame, Cris Carter and Randy Moss. But for the first time in their history, the Falcons rewarded their fans with an unexpected overtime win, 30–27, and secured a spot in Super Bowl XXXIII.
Reeves couldn’t have been more familiar with the Falcons’ Super Bowl opponent. He knew the quirks of the city and the region, the skills and psychology of the quarterback, and the thought process of the head coach. Instead of standing with a bunch of overmatched Broncos on Super Bowl Sunday, Reeves was now across from them. They were led by two people he hadn’t always gotten along with when he coached in Denver: head coach Mike Shanahan, who had been his offensive coordinator, and quarterback John Elway, who had famously willed the Reeves Broncos to their first Super Bowl with a ninety-eight-yard march known as the Drive. Unfortunately for Atlanta, the Falcons-Broncos matchup took on the predictable theme of This Is Your Life, but the subject was not Reeves; it was the Falcons, with all their tragicomic history crashing the party before the party could even start.
Really, only Falcons loyalists could appreciate the absurdity of what happened the day before the game in Miami. Falcons safety Eugene Robinson was presented with the Bart Starr Award, given to a player for his high moral character and leadership. Robinson was an outspoken Christian, nicknamed the Prophet because of his ability to dispense Bible-verse wisdom. He proudly accepted the award on a Saturday morning, smiling as he stood with his wife and two children. Later that night, he drove down Biscayne Boulevard apparently looking to pay for oral sex. He wasn’t the first athlete to do it, and he wasn’t even the first Christian athlete to do it, but it was just fitting that he would do it on the same night that Miami-Dade police had targeted the Biscayne area and had a sting operation in effect to curtail prostitution and drug use. So fewer than twenty-four hours before the Falcons would play the most meaningful game in their history, one of their leaders was arrested, along with twenty-four other johns, and charged with soliciting an undercover police officer for oral sex. The Falcons had gone from the Hillbillies to Night Court.
Robinson played the next day, but of course, he was on the wrong end of the biggest play of the Super Bowl: Elway noticed that Robinson was badly out of position, and in a 10–3 game, the quarterback found receiver Rod Smith for an eighty-yard scoring play that officially lit the torch for the blowout. The Falcons would trail by as many as 25 points before losing 34–19.
There were more complicated days ahead for the Falcons in terms of producing consistent and reliable teams. Reeves displayed some foresight before the 1999 draft, but he didn’t feel comfortable carrying out a plan that didn’t have a lot of in-house support from his personnel staff. The New England Patriots were willing to trade their first-round pick, originally number 20 overall, for Falcons running back Jamal Anderson. Reeves was ecstatic. He liked the twenty-six-year-old back, but Anderson had carried the ball more than four hundred times in 1998 and he wanted to get paid. As a former running back himself, Reeves knew the team had already gotten the best from Anderson. If someone was willing to give up a first-rounder for an All-Pro power back who had carried the ball that much, as well as take on Anderson’s contract demands, Reeves thought they should leap at the deal. They didn’t, and two games into the season, Anderson had blown out his knee.
The franchise began to change two years later, in 2001. While they had played football for thirty-five years and never had back-to-back winning seasons, the Falcons suddenly had hope. A bold play had been made for the number one pick in the draft, which would be used to select Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick. Reeves was captivated by Vick, and long before the Falcons had traded with San Diego for the top pick, the coach walked around the office and referred to Vick as “the Offensive Weapon.” He envisioned building an offense around a quarterback with a sprinter’s speed and a right fielder’s strong arm. Vick was a kid, just twenty years old on draft day, but all the football people from either school, old and new alike, could see how gifted he was. There wasn’t a player like him in the league. If he could ever gather his multiple strands of talent and weave them together, he would lead and entertain and win. At least that was the dream.
As Vick was emerging in his first season with the Falcons, there was a deal being brokered between Taylor Smith, son of the Falcons’ founder, and a local businessman who had already starred in the average American employee’s daydream. Imagine: You and a couple friends start a business, but not just any business. You start a franchise that revolutionizes the marketplace, makes billionaires of you all, and crests as your former employer, who fired you, goes broke and belly-up. That was part of Arthur Blank’s story, the part that began in 1978 when, at the age of thirty-six, he was fired from his management job at a place called Handy Dan Hardware. Blank, Bernie Marcus, and Ken Langone were among those who decided that they would come up with a chain of stores that were bigger than the competitions’. This idealistic place, the Home Depot, would have more inventory, more engagement between employees and customers, better prices, and a philosophy of working—living, really—that couldn’t be altered.
“Bernie and I decided that before we began to think about succession planning and before we thought of who should become the next assistant manager and store managers and district managers, regional vice presidents, presidents, etc., our first question should always be, ‘Are they ambassadors for our culture?’” Blank says. “It’s ‘Do they believe in our culture? Do they live our culture?’ So that became more important than anything else they were doing. They could have been really good at whatever their job was, but if they weren’t great cultural leaders and weren’t strong when it came to character, integrity, trust, and didn’t understand what we were about, then they weren’t going to be promoted. It didn’t matter how good they were at their job.”
Blank bought the Falcons toward the end of the 2001 season, paying $545 million. In the beginning, Blank would be no different from many of the league owners whom he was now joining: On day one, nearly all of them have earnest smiles and a fresh-faced naiveté, confident that universal business principles and common sense can be applied to running an NFL team, too; by their second or third year, there’s the realization that, for example, conceiving and building Home Depot is one thing, while inheriting an NFL team, scars and all, is quite another. If you’re lucky, your kind of coach, your kind of front office, and your kind of team will already be in place. Realistically, it’ll take some firing, hiring, and maybe some mistakes before the organization is truly yours, in deed and principle. After that expensive and often humbling initiation, there’s usually an experienced “You don’t know what you don’t know” gaze reserved for the league’s next wide-eyed new owner.
For most Falcons employees, Blank’s arrival was a good thing. The new owner made it clear that he wanted the best of whatever money, persuasion, or goodwill could buy the Falcons. Best board of directors. Best facilities. Best marketing team. He was not some king in a tower, shouting instructions to peasants. He had a sharp sense of humor and a disarming smile, and his background allowed him to relate to a wide variety of people. He grew up in Queens, which could quickly be heard in his voice, and his family of four had shared a one-bedroom apartment. He and his brother had the bedroom and his parents slept near the foyer on a pullout couch. He was a smart kid but far from an entitled one. His father died when Arthur was fifteen, leaving his mother widowed at thirty-seven. He attended Babson College, just outside of Boston, and graduated in three years. He was a lifelong high achiever and visionary, taking over a franchise that was his opposite.
On the day he was approved by the league and officially took control of the Falcons, he was advised by Patriots owner Robert Kraft that there were many similarities between his previous business and the NFL, but one thing that was not similar was media coverage. It was going to be a new world for him, Kraft warned, so he’d have to prepare for it. Blank listened and invited the Falcons’ head of football communications, Reggie Roberts, to his home to talk.
“It was the first time in my career an owner had reached out to me like that,” says Roberts, who had worked in the league a dozen years before Blank arrived with the Falcons. “We spent more than an hour talking, and he asked a lot of questions about me, as a person, in addition to getting my professional ideas on how we should approach the media. He gave his ideas, but he also listened to mine.”
The presence of Blank improved the work experience for most, but not Reeves. Blank had said he wanted the best of all available things, and that included the best coach and GM, too. Reeves had proved ten times over that he could coach, but the owner didn’t want the head coach to also be in charge of picking the players. It may have been different if Reeves had been exceptional when it came to the draft, simultaneously picking for the present and future, but he wasn’t. So it wasn’t a secret to Reeves or anyone else that Blank was looking for someone to replace part of the job that the head coach had been accustomed to doing.
He first looked to Tampa, whose GM was Rich McKay. The deal broke down when the Buccaneers asked for compensation. But Blank nearly landed an executive superstar a month before the 2002 draft. He reached out to Ron Wolf, who had helped build championship teams in Oakland and Green Bay, and offered him the most lucrative GM contract in the league at the time: $16 million over four years. Wolf, who was sixty-three, turned it down because he wondered if he had the energy and preparation to do the job well.
From Blank’s perspective, searching for a top GM made sense. But the search, the temporary solutions, the near misses, the consultants, and the coaching changes that would follow created a philosophical maze in his scouting department. There would be no true absorbing of the system for the scouts, because just as they would go to sink into it, the rules of the system would change. They’d be going from a 4–3 defense to a 3–4 and back to a 4–3. They’d be told to focus on power backs one day and then change-of-pace backs the next. They needed smaller offensive linemen for one coach’s zone blocking scheme, and suddenly they were looking for three-hundred-plus-pound brutes for another.
The confusion started shortly after the 2002 draft. On draft day, Reeves and Ron Hill shared the thought that they were sitting on a sleeper pick. The Falcons were picking eighteenth, and leading up to the draft, they hadn’t heard a single draftnik or “secret source” whisper that anyone in front of them was thinking of selecting Syracuse pass rusher Dwight Freeney. That was their guy. They’d design special schemes for him in defensive coordinator Wade Phillips’s 3–4, with Freeney’s speed and instincts too much for most offensive linemen to account for. In some ways, he’d be the Vick of their defense. But the Colts, picking eleventh, saw the same talent that Atlanta did and drafted the six-foot defensive end who was supposed to slip in the draft due to his less-than-ideal height. When it was time for the Falcons to pick, their consolation prize was a 250-pound running back named T. J. Duckett.
It turned out that the 2002 draft was Reeves’s last one as a decision-maker. After the draft, the personnel department had to deal with some awkward office politics. Reeves was still the coach, of course, but the man he brought in to help him in personnel, Hill, was now responsible for picking the players. So, theoretically, Hill could draft players and Reeves, as caretaker of the fifty-three-man roster, could cut them. Both men handled the move with grace, although it was obvious the arrangement wouldn’t and couldn’t last. It was no way to build a team, and more important, Blank continued to search for a GM who was going to replace at least one of them, if not both.
On the field, second-year quarterback Vick was becoming everything that Reeves imagined. As traditional as Reeves was in some ways, he had told his staff early on that they were to adjust to Vick and not the other way around. So at its core, the Falcons’ offense was basic, but the improvisation of Vick made it appear complex. He was a legitimate threat to score each time he tucked the ball away and headed upfield. He hadn’t mastered the nuances of the passing game, but everyone could see the enormity of his talent, so there was excitement and curiosity when he painted outside the lines or acted like he didn’t see lines at all. He was getting away with things on the field that weren’t supposed to be possible in the NFL, or with the laws of gravity, from making defenders grasp at air because they thought they had him to flicking a pass sixty yards without so much as a grunt.
The team’s season highlight came in the play-offs when the Falcons traveled to Green Bay. Vick was a Pro Bowler, and his nearly eight hundred yards rushing got him more respect as a runner than a passer. On a 20-degree Wisconsin night, he did just enough of both as Atlanta jumped to a 24–0 halftime lead. The final was 27–7, a victory convincing enough to make you believe in illusions. It appeared that Vick had grown up and the Falcons had turned a corner, and neither was true.
The problem wasn’t just a loss the next week in Philadelphia in the divisional round. It was about team-building, from expecting accountability of leaders, such as Vick, to coming up with something more than a Top 40 music roster, good for today but ultimately not good enough to be timeless. What the Falcons needed was a system, a program. Yet the last major act of the Reeves-Hill administration was a shortsighted trade: The Falcons gave up their first-round pick, number 23 overall, for Buffalo Bills receiver Peerless Price. They projected him as a number one receiver and gave him a fat contract to match. It was the type of deal that most smart franchises agonized over before making, if they made it at all. The superficial logic was that no player of that caliber would be available for the Falcons at spot 23, a line of thinking that didn’t factor in a team’s ability to either trade the pick up, down, or away for future picks. Nor did it acknowledge cost control. Pick 23, which turned out to be running back Willis McGahee, got a contract that could have been worth $15 million in total, with incentives, but included just $4 million in actual guarantees. With a $10 million signing bonus alone, the Falcons had guaranteed Price more than twice McGahee’s compensation.
It’s one of the reasons the Steelers, whom Blank respected for their stability, hadn’t been without a first-round pick since 1967. For better or worse, whether Hall of Famer or bust or in between, they had made their first-round picks practically every year the Falcons had been in existence. On draft day 2003, as the Falcons sat out the first round, the Steelers traded up to spot 16 for USC safety Troy Polamalu; the Falcons, with less draft capital after the trade for Price, were locked into spot 55 and took Penn State safety Bryan Scott.
There was more than the obvious numerical gap between picks 16 and 55. It was symbolic of the chasm that existed between one of the NFL’s most stable football factories, in Pittsburgh, and a football operation in Atlanta whose long-term thoughts were akin to quotes on a daily calendar: It says one thing on the first, so you go in that direction, and if it says something completely different on the second, you happily contradict your path and go there. For the Falcons to become the football version of Home Depot, Blank was going to have to find a personnel man who could change the thinking from day-to-day and season-to-season to something greater, more thoughtful, and more permanent. Bad luck wasn’t keeping the Falcons from back-to-back winning seasons. Bad thinking was.
In 2003, Blank was still five years away from meeting Thomas Dimitroff, who was going into his second draft with the Patriots. Dimitroff was thirty-six, the same age Blank was when he began to give definition to the thought of Home Depot. From afar, based on nothing but appearances and pop-culture stereotyping, both men could easily have been mistaken for something they weren’t. Blank, sixty-one, believed in risk-taking just as much as the cycling and snowboarding scout did, if not more. Dimitroff, perceived as the anything-goes hippie, believed that the key to a strong organization was “clearly defined, indisputable roles” as well as unmistakable leadership. They put different flourishes and accents on their big ideas, a borough echoing from one man and Boulder from the other, but the ideas in many cases were identical.
If you believe in karma, people meet when or if they are supposed to, so Blank and Dimitroff weren’t ready for each other in August 2003. Blank still didn’t have a GM, but what bothered him and all of Atlanta more was that he didn’t have a quarterback. Vick broke his right fibula in a preseason game, and the most optimistic news was that he’d miss just six weeks. That seemed ambitious when Vick showed up at a press conference seemingly mummified in a black cast. He was going to be out for a while, and Reeves was going to learn what it was like to build a franchise around a quarterback who’s not able to play.
When the NFL season started, the Falcons didn’t start with it. They won their first game, lost their next seven, won one more, and then lost the next three. At 2–10, the future didn’t look good for Reeves. After missing the first twelve games, Vick returned in December against Carolina. He played as if the broken leg had been a publicity stunt. The Panthers would wind up in the Super Bowl, against the Patriots, but they had no defense for Vick. He looked as quick as normal, if not quicker. He threw for 179 yards and ran for 141 more.
Anyone from Panthers coach John Fox to defensive end Julius Peppers could tell you what an athlete he was, but it wasn’t just athleticism that led thousands of people and dozens of corporate sponsors to the Georgia Dome. He was a stylist and a showman, as much as local musicians Usher and Cee Lo Green were. He was as much a home-run hitter as Chipper Jones was. And he sparked passionate debates about categorizing, great quarterback or great athlete, as much as any stance-taking politician could. What he couldn’t do, as Reeves learned after win number three, was save jobs. The coach knew that Blank was going to fire him at the end of the year, so he asked to leave with three regular-season games remaining.
It didn’t take long for Blank to finally get his GM, Tampa’s McKay, who was also team president. It was a good hire. McKay was smart, respected around the league, and had presided over a Super Bowl winner with the 2002 Buccaneers. But, no disrespect to McKay, some scouts had exasperated sighs when given the news.
Another system?
Another head coach?
What’s it going to be this time?
McKay was schooled in the Tampa 2, a 4–3 defense that doesn’t work unless the middle linebacker can run like a defensive back and the defensive ends can fly to the quarterback. Defensive backs primarily play zone to prevent big plays. Essentially, scouting for the Tampa 2 is a lot different from scouting for the 3–4 that Reeves and Phillips taught. McKay hired Jim Mora, the younger, to be his head coach, and Mora promised to do something that Reeves never wanted to: put Vick in a specific system and see if he could thrive in it. When McKay brought in longtime personnel man Tim Ruskell to be assistant general manager, a scouting system was in place, too.
No matter what the stats revealed, Michael Vick wouldn’t be able to be better in Atlanta than he was in 2004. He was still that rare artist, a pianist who could play a Steinway beautifully without studying it. He was also living a bit of a double life, and in 2004 no one had begun to chip away at it yet. The Falcons won eleven games in the first year of McKay-Mora and advanced to the conference championship before losing to Philadelphia.
The franchise revolved around Vick as an athlete and marketer. When he was in the Falcons’ offices in Flowery Branch, Vick was comfortable. He talked about his interest in wine and being on his boat in Chesapeake Bay. If employees had their kids around, he would strike up conversations and sign autographs. But as much as he painted as he saw fit on the field, he did the same in his personal life. He worked on his game on his own terms, which was not much. He kept company with petty criminals from Newport News, Virginia, his hometown. Reeves knew he had some issues when the Falcons drafted him, but no one knew the extent. Yet the Falcons knew that he had to be monitored and worked with, long before his life started to fall apart, because there were far too many problematic signs.
“We were cool. Obviously there were no hints of the slovenliness that he would eventually admit to,” says Darryl Orlando Ledbetter, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution sportswriter who covered Vick on the Falcons beat. “I never got the sense from him that he was ever committed to being great. He always thought his athletic ability would bail him out of everything. And you know, whether it was Virginia Tech or the Falcons, he always had somebody running behind him, trying to clean up the mess that he or his friends had left.”
It was no coincidence that as glimpses of Vick’s private life began to be revealed to the public, one layer at a time, the Falcons began to sink with him. Only in hindsight does anyone mention that the organization had an in-house replacement available with a third-round pick from McKay’s first Falcons draft, quarterback Matt Schaub. Fans would have never forgiven the franchise if it had picked Schaub over Vick. Instead, the Falcons braced for the public-relations hits and prepared press releases, having no idea what they were actually protecting and defending.
During the 2004 season, when everyone was paying attention to the field, two of Vick’s friends had been entangled in the case of a stolen Rolex at the Atlanta airport. The case didn’t receive a lot of coverage. In April 2005, a woman who described herself as Vick’s ex-girlfriend sued him for knowingly giving her a sexually transmitted disease. He never told her that he was infected with genital herpes and, according to the lawsuit, used the alias “Ron Mexico” to receive treatment. The case was settled out of court a year later. “That whole situation was a by-product of thinking that you’re above the law,” Ledbetter says. “And now the young woman has health problems for life.”
In November 2006, after the Falcons lost at home to New Orleans, Vick responded to hecklers by twice holding up his middle finger. He was fined $20,000 and apologized repeatedly the next day in a press conference. He was unraveling and so were the Falcons. They went 2–6 in the second half of 2005 and finished 8–8. They were 7–9 in 2006, one of the reasons Mora lost his job. Ten days after former Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino was settling into the position vacated by Mora, in January 2007, there was yet another Vick airport incident, this time in Miami. He tried to get a twenty-ounce water bottle past security, but it was confiscated and initially tossed into a recycling bin. It was quickly retrieved when Vick seemed to show a special interest in it. The bottle had a hidden compartment that smelled of marijuana. He was cleared a few days later when the tested bottle showed no marijuana traces.
Finally, the biggest secret of all was exposed four days before the 2007 draft. Police raided a property owned by Vick in Virginia and found evidence of a dogfighting operation. There was a federal raid in July, and a week before the Falcons opened training camp, Vick and three others (including Quanis Phillips, one of the friends from the Rolex incident at the airport) were indicted by a federal grand jury. They faced charges ranging from dogfighting to interstate gambling. The more news that trickled out, the worse Vick looked. Dogs had been trained to fight to kill if necessary, and when they could not perform, they were killed by their owners. Vick and others were linked to sickening acts, accused of either shooting, drowning, or hanging the dogs when there was no longer any use for them. When the story first broke, Vick told his employers that he wasn’t involved and that his name would be cleared. Those in denial believed him, but as one Falcons employee put it, “They’re not going to be on the world news indicting you one day and then the next wake up and say, ‘Oh, by the way, we got this wrong.’”
When training camp started, the emphasis was on the word “camp”: The animal-rights camp, with outraged activists, was on one side; the Vick camp, with supporters wearing his jerseys, was on another; and above all an airplane flew with a sign that read NEW TEAM NAME: DOG KILLERS.
Vick was down, so that meant the franchise was, too. Everyone was going to have to start over. For Vick, that meant nearly two years of prison time. For Petrino, it meant going back to college, because a franchise without Vick was not what he had signed up for. For Atlanta it meant learning how to trust, once again, a franchise that took more than it gave. And for Blank, going into his sixth season of ownership, it meant going back in time.
He didn’t know what Home Depot would become in 1978, but at least he knew what was being put into it. There were no surprises in the foundation. He knew how much time and thought he had put into making it work, how Bernie Marcus had spent his fiftieth birthday stocking the shelves himself at night, sweating profusely because he wanted to save money and not run the air conditioning when there were no customers in the building. That was real. What Blank tried to build on with the Falcons was a fraud. How could you build something great with a superstar who has shameful blood on his hands while you have your own sweat on yours? How can you be a partner with someone whose time and energy is spent establishing another “company,” not the one that gave him stardom and wealth and a platform in the first place? Blank was going to have to go back to the time when the Home Depot was an idea and not a building. It was a few men who depended on one another, guys who thought nothing of getting their hands dirty and bringing a great idea to life, one nail at a time.
The first e-mail came from Bernie Marcus, which was a bit of a surprise because as Blank says, “He never writes e-mails. He has a computer, and I think he’s just learning to turn it on.” The next e-mail came from Pat Farrah, another Home Depot cofounder. “When it came to merchandising, Pat would think of fifty ideas, and forty-eight would drive me directly into bankruptcy. But the other two were so brilliant that nobody would ever think of them. And if you did those two and did them well, you were going to put yourself years ahead of everybody else.”
The e-mails were reminders of how good business was supposed to look and feel. They reminded Blank, who was at the low point of his ownership, to think about what had worked in the past before rushing forward with a plan to remake the Falcons. He listened to his friends and former partners and began the process of interviewing several coaching and GM candidates in person. One of the candidates, Bill Parcells, did him a huge favor, although it probably didn’t feel that way at the time.
Parcells was in place as the next Atlanta football czar. If it had been a wedding, Parcells and the Falcons would have already exchanged rings and been close to the “If anyone has any objections to this union…” stage. The deal fell apart, and Parcells went to Miami.
It would have been a splash to have Parcells in Atlanta, but would it have been the right move? He could build a team quickly and bring legitimacy, but he could also be there for three years. Or one. It would have been yet another temporary solution, and besides, it was too easy. Anybody can point out the best football minds who have already had decades of success. It’s harder, but more rewarding, to find a team builder for the next generation. It might be someone whose name doesn’t sell tickets, but the quality teams he puts together does.
By late 2007 and in January 2008, Blank had heard from and met with dozens of candidates. Nothing clicked for him like the webcam interview with Thomas Dimitroff did. When the interview ended, Blank wasn’t the only one convinced that the Falcons had found a franchise fixer. Dean Stamoulis, who represented independent recruiting consultant Russell Reynolds and took notes during all the Falcons interviews, said Dimitroff’s performance was the best of them all. Through his work at Russell Reynolds, Stamoulis had sat in on dozens of interviews around the country and world, trying to help corporations find leaders or retain them. As soon as Dimitroff appeared on the webcam screen, Stamoulis began writing.
Offbeat look, he wrote. What’s with the hair?
Dimitroff’s brown hair was long and at the top it appeared to be teased and moussed. He often made fun of his look, calling himself Jimmy Neutron, the Nickelodeon cartoon character with the same hairstyle. Mindful of Dimitroff’s love for Boulder and the city’s agreeable and laid-back reputation, Stamoulis also wrote, We may want to get this guy drug-tested.
After a few minutes, Stamoulis, who has a background in industrial and organizational psychology, saw beneath the superficial surface and found what he considered to be Dimitroff’s brilliance. It wasn’t just that the GM-to-be effortlessly quoted Thoreau as he was making a point about football. He was able to show his smarts and flexibility by talking about the game of football for a few minutes and then showing an understanding of football business ten minutes later. Stamoulis made a flurry of notes: Able to see the big picture… Clearly smart … amazing focus on detail … amazing rigor… Profoundly driven… Get the feeling that he has a mental model for what the job is and has spent a lot of time thinking it through.
“You had to be intelligent, and you had to be able to present your ideas in an intelligent manner. Arthur had been used to dealing with Rich, so you’re dealing with a smart person who is used to hearing smart football people,” says Les Snead, the Falcons pro personnel director who was part of the GM search committee. “You couldn’t just be ‘the Old Football Guy.’ You know what I mean? Thomas came off as intelligent, organized, clear, and there was an innovative side to him. I don’t think Arthur Blank’s ever worried about, ‘Hey, this guy can do a toe-side turn on a snowboard.’ If anything, Arthur kind of likes people like that.”
Dimitroff got the job and headed to Atlanta. His temporary home was the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, close to Blank’s family office. When Dimitroff went to the office one day to interview a coaching candidate, Mike Smith, he had an experience similar to the Web interview. Talking about football philosophy was easy and fun with the Jacksonville defensive coordinator, and it made the two men lose track of time. Blank opened the door several times to check on them and they’d alternate saying, “Just give us a few more minutes.” A few more minutes would become forty-five minutes here, an hour there. The two had never formally met, but they saw too many things the same way. Smith was a natural leader, the son of schoolteachers and the oldest of eight children. He was a football guy to his core, but with his silver hair and effortless grin he looked like a more muscular version of the comedian Steve Martin. He and Dimitroff could have spent the whole day talking schemes and players if they wanted, since both of them had devoted so much of their lives to the game, but they were more interested in talking about building. If football was such a critical part of their lives, why not figure out how to build an organization that would allow them to enjoy football, in one place, for years?
Dimitroff had been imagining his ideal football environment for most of his professional life. It amused him when he would be in a football crowd and get strange looks for something he wore or something he said. Scott Pioli knew him better than most, so he could get away with calling him “Eurotrash” for his trendy clothing style. But he knew there was a real belief among many in the league that credible football people were supposed to look or sound a certain way, which is like everyone else. It was an odd dynamic that existed among coaches and personnel people: Everyone wanted to win a Super Bowl, which separates you from the pack; yet if you were perceived as too separate from the pack in your pursuit of winning, it drew scoffs.
“I know there was a time with certain people, there was a whole self-righteous perception thing from people toward me,” Dimitroff says. “And that was not it at all. I never, ever, proselytized about my vegan diet, or my approach, or my environmental bent. Never. Only to people who were interested in talking about it. I was very mindful of that. And you know, a lot of people knew my dad in the business. And on the ribbing side, they would often say, ‘In so many ways, you’re like your father … but in other ways, you’re so not like your dad.’
“I think all of us in football, in general, are a bit myopic. I know when I was just getting started in the NFL, there was an element of rigidity in how you should dress, shave, wear your hair, speak, and behave politically. I always wanted to create a culture where everyone is passionate and intensely involved in their work, but there’s also enough levity to make the journey enjoyable.
“We’re all driven, focused, serious, tough-ass football people. All of us in this business are that way. But I think we all crave something outside of that realm, too. We all need relief. I remember back in the day, some coaches would be aghast that you’d take ninety minutes out of the day to have a workout and have lunch. I mean, it’s something I don’t even have to address: There’s a time to work and there’s a time to pull back. Everyone in the building is very aware of that.”
During that first interview, Dimitroff and Smith had talked about building a culture in football that was vibrant, authentic, and honest. They both hated the thought, for example, of leaving the job of releasing a player to someone else. They agreed that when it was time to release someone, the best way to do it was for them to be in the room together and be honest about the decision to move on. It was the best way to treat people.
It’s one thing to have a theoretical philosophy and something different to have to put your thoughts into practice. Within a couple weeks on the job, Dimitroff made two moves that earned him instant respect among the scouts and let them know what kind of leader, and man, he was.
The first move proved that he was practical and adaptable. The scouts had spent the fall preparing for the draft, using the language of their own scouting system. Dimitroff was planning to overhaul the system and install the one used by the Patriots, which was difficult to learn quickly. Since Dimitroff had been the college director in New England, he was confident that he knew the draft, even if he knew it in terminology that his new staff didn’t understand. So he agreed that any kind of system change should wait until after the draft, and in the meantime he would begin to communicate in the language that they had been using.
“But I wanted to make it clear that a change was coming,” he says. “I wanted them to start thinking in the new Falcon vernacular.”
It’s a good thing he didn’t make them start thinking about it immediately, because it was going to take a Dimitroff scouting seminar, and most likely a full year, for everyone to be fluent in it. It was a revolutionary grading scale that was based on the value of a specific position. It forced a scout to go deeper, eliminate gray areas, and say exactly what they projected a player would be in the NFL. The idea was for the grade, with 1 being the lowest, 9 being the highest, and 6 representing a starter, to reflect the value to the team. For example, based on today’s NFL, it made sense that a number two running back would have a 5.9 grade, which the scale says is a backup, and for a third receiver or third corner to have a 6.3, which the scale considers a starter. The grade factors in a passing-heavy league, where third corners and receivers are heavily valued.
The scale was also one of comparatives. The idea was to know the Falcons’ roster, one to fifty-three, and be able to provide a snapshot for who a prospect is compared to his Falcon counterpart. It wasn’t good enough to say that a player was a “first-round pick” (you’d be thrown out of the room for that) or someone who could start “by his second year in the league.” The system was created and tweaked to make it leaner and more specific. What was the player’s value to the Falcons? And ultimately, who on our roster is this kid from Texas or Alabama or USC going to replace?
It was a system full of numbers, colors, and upper- and lowercase letters that the scouts would have to learn, too. It had numerous columns for athletic ability, positional strength, and change of direction. It also had grades for character, which took on greater importance given where the franchise had just been.
The new Falcon vernacular wasn’t just the grading scale that they were about to learn. It was an emphasis on consistency, transparency, and loyalty. What annoyed the new GM more than anything was waffling, especially from leadership that was supposed to be setting a tone. As liberal as he was in many aspects of his life, he couldn’t compromise when it came to inconsistency. He’d call people out on it. He’d call himself out on it. He wanted anyone working for him to know what he was thinking, whether they liked to hear it or not; that’s why he felt compelled to have a conversation with a man he respected, college scouting director Phil Emery.
Emery had been intrigued by the scouting process since his sophomore year at Wayne State University in Michigan, his home state. He was a member of the football team then, and he remembered seeing a scout, sixteen-millimeter projector in tow, on his way to the football office. He thought it probably was one of the best jobs in the country, being able to travel, meet new people, and see some of the top athletes in America. He had overseen the previous three drafts in Atlanta as director, drafts that had produced players such as Roddy White, Jonathan Babineaux, Stephen Nicholas, and Justin Blalock. The Michael Vick situation had brought ridicule to the entire organization, but there were many smart football men like Emery who wanted to prove that there was actual talent beneath the rubble.
Dimitroff told Emery that he liked his work, but he was making Dave Caldwell the new college director. Caldwell had worked several years with the Colts, and when he and Dimitroff saw each other on the road, they talked football and had similar ideas. When Dimitroff was hired, there were two guys he knew he had to get: Caldwell and Lionel Vital, who had worked with two generations of Dimitroffs. Emery was offered a job as national scout, but there was no way around it: It was a demotion.
He was crushed.
“I felt a genuine loss and underwent somewhat of a personal grieving period that most likely anyone goes through when you lose your ‘spot’ in life,” Emery says. Dimitroff told him that news of the change was just between them, and he wanted Emery to keep his standing as college director through the upcoming draft. Emery appreciated how the difficult situation was handled, and Dimitroff made a note of how much class and professionalism Emery displayed the entire time.
“I worked very hard at developing a positive relationship with Thomas and Dave,” Emery says. “I wanted everyone to feel comfortable around me after the transition so I could continue to contribute positively to the scouting process. I decided for that to happen I needed to be the most positive person in the building about the new direction we were taking through Thomas’s leadership.”
No one would have guessed that Dimitroff and Emery had ever had an issue. As the Falcons got closer to the April draft, Emery was right there next to the GM as he tried to figure out which player would be taken with the third overall pick. Emery traveled with a group of executives and coaches to private workouts for Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Chad Henne, and Glenn Dorsey. Emery respected Dimitroff. And Dimitroff respected him so much that, when a better opportunity arose for Emery a year later, he was his top advocate.
Office dynamics aside, there was plenty of work to do on the Falcons’ roster. Any GM, whether in the NFL or fantasy football, could see that the team’s top need was a quarterback. Vick had taken the franchise out at the knees, so even when he was finished serving his nearly two-year prison sentence he wasn’t going to return. But the Vick issue was complicated. He had been so charming, to ownership, his teammates, and his fans, that he’d actually had an impact on the Falcons even after he was gone.
Five players, Roddy White, Joe Horn, Alge Crumpler, DeAngelo Hall, and Chris Houston, had all been fined by the NFL for on-field tributes to Vick in 2007. On the morning of December 10, Vick received his prison sentence. That night, the Falcons played a home game against New Orleans. White wore a black T-shirt with white lettering that read FREE MIKE VICK. The shirt was under his jersey, but it was revealed when Horn pulled up the jersey so the crowd and cameras could see it. Hall was on the field before the game with a Vick poster. The other players wore black eye strips with written tributes to Vick.
Dimitroff believed he could get a quarterback in the draft, but clearly replacing the quarterback wasn’t the only issue. Among other things, the Falcons needed to be psychologically free of Vick, too. They needed help everywhere. They didn’t have a reliable left tackle who could protect a quarterback; they were either too old at the position, with thirty-six-year-old Wayne Gandy, or too young and questionable, with twenty-three-year-old Quinn Ojinnaka. They had been ranked in the league’s bottom four on offense and defense. Their leading rusher, Warrick Dunn, rushed for just 720 yards and averaged just over 3 yards per carry.
They also had a couple players who got the GM’s attention more for their attitude than their play. One of those players was Hall, a cornerback who had been a top-ten pick in 2004. His 2007 season had been filled with controversy. It started with a bizarre September episode in which he melted down on the field with interference and unsportsmanlike-conduct penalties, and then had to be restrained on the sideline after yelling at his coaches. It ended with the Vick tribute. He had been selected to the Pro Bowl the previous two seasons, and those selections fed an ego that was already outsized. He was exactly the kind of player who could undermine the good intentions of a new leadership team, so he quickly became part of Dimitroff’s history: He was the first player the new GM traded.
A couple years earlier, Dimitroff had been in Indianapolis at the Scouting Combine when he entered an elevator with a Hall of Famer. He immediately recognized Al Davis, the legendary owner of the Oakland Raiders. Dimitroff introduced himself: “Hello, Mr. Davis. I’m Thomas Dimitroff…” Davis smiled before the Patriots’ director of college scouting could continue. “Ah, Dimitroff,” Davis said. “I knew your father.” They had a brief and pleasant chat.
In March 2008, after just two months on the job, Dimitroff talked with Davis about acquiring Hall. Throughout his career, Davis had been riveted by fast receivers and corners. He envisioned pairing Hall with the Raiders’ Nnamdi Asomugha, considered to be the best corner in the NFL. Dimitroff was looking for multiple draft picks so he could start to fill in some of the numerous holes on his roster. They agreed that the Raiders would send the Falcons a second-round pick in 2008 and a fifth-rounder in 2009. The Raiders would happily take Hall and sign him to a $70 million contract with $24 million in guarantees.
“I’m just relieved, happy to be out of a bad situation in Atlanta, a situation that wasn’t the right fit for me,” Hall told his hometown paper, the Virginian-Pilot. “I’m happy to go to Oakland where I’m wanted, to team up with Nnamdi Asomugha and create a great secondary. I think you can argue me and Nnamdi will probably be the two best corners ever to team up, side by side… I’m a Pro Bowl player, he’s a Pro Bowl player. It’s just going to be great to have another guy alongside me that I feel confident can hold his own weight. I don’t have to worry about teams avoiding me, because they can’t avoid both of us.”
For considerably less cash than the Raiders spent on Hall, the Falcons had made their mark in free agency three weeks earlier by signing the best available running back, Michael Turner. He had spent his entire career as a backup in San Diego, but Turner projected well as a starter. There was no question Turner’s 250-pound body could take the punishment of being an every-down back, so Dimitroff thought that offering him a contract with $15 million in guarantees was worth the risk.
When it was time for Dimitroff to make his first draft pick for the Falcons, there wasn’t much uncertainty. A few nights before the draft he talked to Scott Pioli, whose Patriots were scheduled to pick seventh by virtue of their trade with the 49ers the year before. There didn’t have to be much secrecy with Pioli regarding the pick because there was zero chance the Patriots would be drafting Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan.
“Are you sure about him, Thomas?” Pioli asked, knowing the gamble of taking a quarterback that high. A miss at that position in the top five was the quickest route to unemployment.
“Definitely,” Dimitroff replied.
He had seen all the throws on tape and in person. He had interviewed him. At times, he even allowed himself to think that Ryan had certain leadership qualities that reminded him of Tom Brady. There was no hesitation on draft day when it was time for the Falcons to pick. They took Ryan. As the draft got into the early teens, there was a furious run on tackles. Over a span of eight picks, five tackles were selected. The Falcons needed someone to protect Ryan, so they made a trade with Washington, using the second-rounder they got from Oakland to help them get back into the first round. They selected USC’s Sam Baker.
They still had a second-rounder, even after the trade for Baker, and they used that one on Oklahoma middle linebacker Curtis Lofton, whom they expected to be an immediate starter.
After the draft, it was time to spend more money. Ryan was signed to a six-year contract for $72 million. Dimitroff had been told by a former GM, Ernie Accorsi, to concentrate on one area of team-building at a time. Don’t try to fix everything all at once because it could become overwhelming. In fewer than six months on the job, Dimitroff had hired a new coach, installed a new grading system, signed the top free-agent running back on the market, traded a former top-ten pick, and made a strong financial commitment to a top-ten pick of his own.
He believed that all of the additions would be good fits in Atlanta. These Falcons were long-term builders now.