FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — The Atlanta Falcons have one of the largest coaching staffs in the NFL under new head coach Raheem Morris. The 26 coaches, by CBS Sports Research’s count, is good for third largest in the entire league.
Look just at the offensive side of the ball. There’s first-year offensive coordinator Zac Robinson with quarterbacks coach T.J. Yates behind him. D.J. Williams is the assistant QBs coach, then there’s veteran coach Ken Zampese as a senior offensive assistant. Tim Berbenich is the pass game specialist, and offensive line coach Dwayne Ledford is the run game coordinator.
This is without mentioning two offensive assistants.
When I sat down with Morris during the Falcons’ one-day minicamp in June, I asked him why he figured he needed such a large staff. The conceit, he admits, can be a bit … conceited.
“It’s the attrition of knowing that you’re going to be good. It’s a little bit of arrogance with it as well, right?” Morris said from his office. “We’re going to lose good coaches. And I would like to be able to replace them within. I would like to be able to have guys in place that are training and constantly develop for those roles.
“When you do it, you don’t come into this thing hoping you can win. You go into this thing knowing you can win. And when you know you can win, you’re going to lose people that are curious about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And I want to be prepared for that.”
Morris’ beliefs come from experience. He was on Sean McVay’s staff for three seasons, including a Super Bowl-winning one, and saw talented coaches get poached. In his first tour of duty in Atlanta, he recalls a 2016 Falcons staff that lost Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Mike LaFleur, Mike McDaniel and Bobby Turner after their Super Bowl run.
Whether you believe the 2024 Falcons are legitimate contenders for a Lombardi run, clearly they do. They believe they’re close. They see an NFC South that can be wrested away from the Buccaneers, themselves winners of the weak division for three straight years.
In those same three years, the Falcons have put up identical 7-10 marks under old head coach Arthur Smith. Last year’s group managed to beat most of their opponents with winning records, but tallied a dreadful 2-6 record against those with losing records.
It’s the years of adding skill positions through the draft; so much so that former No. 4 overall pick Kyle Pitts may be option No. 4 in this offense. It’s building up a solid offensive line that can be effective in the run and pass games. But it’s also believing so much in the group there that you can use the eighth overall pick on a quarterback six weeks after guaranteeing $100 million to another. (More on that a little later.)
So much of this expected success depends on Kirk Cousins, who, when I visited in June, was doing slightly more on the field than I expected. It’s a glorified walkthrough as the one and only day of minicamp, but just more than seven months removed from Achilles surgery, the 35-year-old is taking all his dropbacks and even doing some bootleg action.
“Ah, no. I mean, I can move, I can move,” Cousins tells me after practice when I register my surprise. “I think what I’ve learned is, it’s a pretty steady process to go from the day of surgery to about 90 percent. That final 10 percent feels like most of the journey. Like to go from ‘I can almost do everything’, to the ‘almost’ is removed. It feels like that’s a big hurdle to cross.”
Cousins wouldn’t say then whether he was at that 90 percent threshold, but he’s balancing how much to push himself. Doctors told him it’s a nine-month recovery — he had surgery Nov. 1 — but that in many ways he wouldn’t feel normal until 12 months.
Last summer while with the Vikings, Cousins hired a bodywork coach who’s actually from the Atlanta area. They work together nearly every day with three sessions each day, trying various rest and recovery methods.
No one would be surprised if Cousins doesn’t play in any of the three preseason games, but he tells me he expects to be ready for Week 1 and that he’s “trending towards being ready” in Atlanta’s opener against the Steelers.
Morris will tell local media it’s hard for him to say Cousins is limited even though he knows he is. They haven’t done anything live around his feet, obviously, and they’re careful about the plays they’ve run so far.
Remember, this was the traditional Achilles surgery and not the new-age speedbridge process that had Aaron Rodgers cleared by his doctor to play after three months.
Isn’t it human nature, I ask Cousins, to press yourself a little more after the team picked Michael Penix Jr. in April’s draft? After inking a four-year, $180 million contract to be the franchise quarterback — and after leaving Minnesota in part because you couldn’t get that assurance there — doesn’t the selection of a quarterback in the top 10 of the draft light an even greater fire under you to physically perform on the field as soon as possible?
“I think I’m naturally a pusher,” Cousins said. “So if anything in this rehab, talking about pushing up to the line, the concern for me was not ‘Will I push hard enough?’ The concern was ‘How soon? How much am I going to try to jump over the line?’ So it’s pretty natural for me to push. I don’t know that anything externally would change that.”
General manager Terry Fontenot agrees. He says the drive Cousins has exhibited throughout his career is a big reason why the Falcons hitched their wagon to him on the first day of free agency even though he’d be coming off an Achilles in his age-36 season.
“There doesn’t need to be a carrot,” Fontenot says. “That was a big part of determining that you want to pursue him. You better make sure that he has a real drive, that he wants to continue to get to the next step. This guy wants to do everything he can do to win the Super Bowl and be a multiplier and bring everybody with him.”
What the Falcons have in Cousins is something they haven’t had since the final years of Matt Ryan in Atlanta. Fontenot points out Cousins led the NFL in passing touchdowns before his Achilles tear halfway through the season, making the point that he’s still at the top of his game today with a proven track record of success.
Beyond that, though, Cousins is a front-of-the-classroom kind of guy. A player who takes copious notes in meetings. The Falcons have had that in players like Grady Jarrett and Jake Matthews among others, but getting that from a top player at the premier position trickles down throughout the rest of the roster.
That’s something that was missing from the Marcus Mariota-Taylor Heinicke-Desmond Ridder Experience from the past two seasons. But the team also got more talented, as well. Signing Darnell Mooney and trading for Rondale Moore got the team more speed. They’ve juiced up both sides of the line.
Atlanta still probably needs another corner opposite A.J. Terrell, and the Falcons must continue pursuing a pass rusher after striking out on Montez Sweat before last year’s trade deadline and failing to trade back into the first round for Laiatu Latu in April’s draft. Of course, they could have gotten Latu at No. 8 if they weren’t so certain about Penix.
There’s no question Cousins was upset about the circumstances surrounding the pick. Few teams draft a quarterback in the top 10 to have him sit for the entirety of the veteran’s four-year contract. And maybe a little head’s up ahead of the draft would have been nice.
The Falcons gave Cousins a few minutes heads up, but they felt that’s all they could do in a draft infamous for subterfuge and clandestine behavior. Plus, they’ve been full throated in their belief Cousins is *the* guy.
Still, Cousins had to say what he had to say to all parties in Atlanta after the pick. The conversations have stayed private, but there was clearly an airing of grievances. Morris talks about not allowing negativity to fill a void, and once Cousins got off his chest what he needed to, he got back to work, disallowing negativity to fill the void.
“Our commitment to Kirk is still our commitment to Kirk,” Morris said. “We gave him a pretty healthy contract that if he goes out there and gets his job done and he’s able to stay on track, I don’t see what can go wrong. There’s a business aspect to everything that we do in football, so there’s always going to be relationship-building. There’s always got to be honesty. They’re always going to be brutal honesty.
“There’s going to be a business element to every part of what we do in football. We always like to relate it to our families, but it’s a little bit different than our families because we separate those things with business and family. Here you got to put those things together and be able to heal those things and bond those things through the everyday, working with the same goal in mind.”
Fontenot wasn’t surprised by the reaction from outside the building after the pick. Hell, he anticipated it. Ahead of the draft, Fontenot will sometimes show his scouting staff videos from takesmen around the draft.
Last year, he showed the staff the legendary video of Merril Hoge correctly predicting Johnny Manziel’s career path to an incredulous Skip Bayless ahead of the 2014 draft. It’s a reminder to the group to focus on your own process, do the right things for the right reasons and ignore the noise.
After years of wandering the quarterback wilderness — an ill-fated late run at former Falcons ballboy Deshaun Watson to praying the third-round Ridder could keep them afloat — the Falcons needed to ensure they’d never be in dire straits at the quarterback position for the foreseeable future.
But putting it off another year wasn’t in the cards for a Falcons group that had conviction in Penix and, as noted, has some confidence in itself.
“You look at the total picture and you look at next year,” Fontenot says. “And it’s easy to say, OK, you know what, dude? We’re gonna push this off. We’re just going to take Latu here or trade back and yeah, we’ll get a quarterback next year. Well OK.
“First of all, we’re going to be picking a lot later next year.”