The drumbeat of reporting around the Atlanta Falcons is that they’ll consider changes to football operations at the end of the year, but of course, you don’t start making that decision after your Week 18 game. You mull it well before, and if you’re smart, you try to weight everything you can before you make a big decision on whether Terry Fontenot, Raheem Morris, and/or others stay and go.
We want the Falcons to give that decision careful consideration and hoped they were doing so. Now, we have some
reporting from Sports Illustrated insider Albert Breer that indicates that they’re not going to put that decision entirely on the team’s usual cast of power brokers, as they’re working with an outside consulting firm.
From Breer:
Owner Arthur Blank’s group has brought the consulting firm Sportology, with whom they’ve partnered with for a while, in to work with them on the Falcons, as well as the MLS’ Atlanta United and the new NWSL expansion team he was awarded (they’ve worked with Blank on building the NWSL club for a little while). For the Falcons’ specifically, it’s an overall health check on the team’s operations. And it’s not been a secret within the walls of the football facility that the evaluation is ongoing.
Time will tell what this means for GM Terry Fontenot and coach Raheem Morris, but there’s plenty of buzz that some level of change is coming, with the team at 6–9, assured of its eighth consecutive season under .500 and home for the playoffs.
Mike Forde, a former executive for the Premier League’s Chelsea F.C., is Sportlogy’s founder, and former Texans GM Rick Smith is among the firm’s partners.
This is interesting on multiple levels. The first is the “overall health check on the team’s operations” piece. If an outside firm decides that the Falcons have been operationally sound despite the poor results for many years running, but find trouble spots in the executive suite, front office, or coaching staff, Arthur Blank is likely to weigh that feedback carefully. If Sportology finds the Falcons are a complete mess top to bottom, it might move Blank to make the kinds of sweeping changes he’s avoided since 2020, with shakeups even higher than the general manager possible if unlikely for Rich McKay and others. That work will presumably combine with the team’s impressions of the past two seasons for Raheem Morris and five seasons for Terry Fontenot, the way this season has evolved, and the perceived state of the roster and the franchise’s team-building approach to help them figure out whether Fontenot, Morris, and others are going to be here next year or not.
The second level is the involvement of Smith, who was one of a few reported candidates on the team’s shortlist for general manager and one of their handful of interviews back in 2021; he lost the job to Fontenot. I’m not suggesting Smith is going to be inclined to try to get Fontenot fired or anything like that, but it’s fascinating to see someone who interviewed for a top job in Atlanta now involved in turning a critical eye toward football operations.
This is ultimately still Blank’s decision, and to the chagrin of many, I would expect Rich McKay to still be around when this is all over and part of the decision-making process, as well. But I do appreciate that the team, which has proven to be less-than-stellar at auditing itself over the years, is willing to bring in consultants who might have a different perspective as they look to make a series of critical decisions coming out of the 2026 season. We’ll talk more about factors in that decision tomorrow, but suffice to say I hope Sportology helps steer Blank and company toward the best possible outcome, whatever that may prove to be.
