With Ian Cunningham landing in Atlanta and former assistant general manager Kyle Smith off to Miami, the Falcons needed a right hand man for the new GM. Per Adam Schefter, they’ve got their man, and it’s someone Cunningham briefly worked with in the past.
The Falcons will reportedly hire Jeff Scott away from the Philadelphia Eagles. The team’s vice president of football operations over the past two years, Scott received a rapid series of promotions after landing in Philly back in 2021 as a senior
scout, moving to a director of football operations position in 2022 and landing his current role in 2024. Before that, he spent nearly a decade with Washington, leaving the Commanders as the team’s assistant director of pro scouting and spending much of his time there in pro scouting. Scott’s a seasoned scout, in other words, with a pro personnel and operations background that clearly made him intriguing to Cunningham.
The two overlapped in 2021, Cunningham’s last year with the Eagles, when the new Falcons GM was the director of player personnel in Philadelphia. The Eagles have now lost four executives this offseason to assistant general manager roles elsewhere, which is what happens when you have one of the most highly-regarded personnel departments in the league.
In Atlanta, Scott will take over for Kyle Smith and bring a different kind of experience to the role; previous GM Terry Fontenot had a pro personnel background and Smith had a college scouting background, but that will be flipped with Cunningham and Scott. On paper, at least, he’s a strong hire for a front office that has talked about doing things differently than their predecessors, and hopefully he can be a key voice in the team’s effort to build (finally, at last) a perennial winner.
Give Scott a warm welcome, if you would.
