Welcome back, Jahcool. Great to see you again. And thanks for visiting our board, Neanderthal Ike. I've been watching for signs that Smitty might be losing control of the team - that the players might be checking out of the program, so to speak. That's the surest sign that a coach will be fired, perhaps even before the end of the season. I thought I started seeing some of those signs in this week's game. The next two games (divisional opponents) are the ones that I have really looked at as the ones that would make it clear. But we might already be seeing the first hints that the locker room is falling out of the grip of our head coach. Something else that I thought was significant: Arthur Blank reportedly declined to speak with the media following the game. He normally doesn't do that. I take it as a sign that his patience is wearing very thin.
Thanks Torgo, Glad to be back. Blank probably wants to fire Smitty but wont do it mid season I think. He probably feels he owes him some dignity of cutting his butt at the end of the season if the ship is not righted. The next two games will definitely be the tell all if this team has checked out. If they pull off these two wins on the road and against division opponents, Smitty will have bought him some time. Hopefully these guys get a taste of winning and want it every damn game. Smitty has to throw that BS nice guy crap out of the window and play to win and put his foot on the throats of these teams when he is up. TD has some blame here as he has not gotten a pass rusher higher than the 5th round since he has gotten here. Last I check those are a necessity to put QBs on their backs. Cant make chicken soup with chicken ish!
The biggest positive is that with 8 games in the book you only have to suffer through 8 more and then your season will be over and you will be thinking about what to do with another top 5 draft pick. Maybe you guys should get a good QB?
Howdy, gidion. Thanks for stopping by. To answer the question, no, Matt Ryan is hardly the problem. (Or were you just trying to bait us?) Here are our current top five roster issues: 1) we have no pass rush whatsoever. Our GM and coaching staff have had seven years to do something about this. But as Jahcool noted above, in those seven years they have never taken a defensive end (or a 3-4 pass rush OLB) above the fourth round. 2) we have wrecked our LB depth. We didn't draft a LB in 2012, and we quickly cut our only free agent. We played that season with only five LBs on the roster - and one of those was dragged out of retirement, while another was a special teams only guy. Yet we didn't draft or sign one in spring of 2013. And for 2014 we ditched two of the three that actually had experience. The other experienced one got hurt, so now we're leaning on two second-year undrafted guys and a fourth round rookie. 3) I'm stealing a hilarious tweet on this one: our offensive line couldn't protect a plate of broccoli from George H.W. Bush. I'm sure everyone here knows about that idiotic interception - the one where Matt Ryan threw a perfect, dead-on-target pass to a wide open Lions defensive back. Ryan said in the postgame interviews that he was trying to throw the ball away. In retrospect, that does make some sense - if you can find a replay, take a look at the linemen. Three Lions are about to bury Ryan while four Falcons linemen are essentially just standing around. Our GM has poured draft picks into the o-line. But this season we have FIVE of them on injured reserve, and the season is only half over. Against the Lions, we started an undrafted rookie at center and an undrafted second year prospect (who never played high school ball and only three years of JC and small school college football) at right tackle. 4) We gradually dismantled our WR depth over a five year period, to the point that for several years we have depended on undrafted free agents to fill in the back end of the unit, and we haven't rebuilt the pipeline. That's not saying we had great UDFAs who beat out other players. We simply didn't have anyone else on the roster for them to beat out (except for other UDFAs). So now our WR group is getting old - Roddy White, Devin Hester and Harry Douglas are all 30+, and even special teams ace Eric Weems turns 30 next summer. But we haven't drafted a single WR in the last three years to replace them - and we have only drafted three total WRs in the seven years of our current regime. One of them never caught a pass before his release. Our guys are showing their age. Hester started out hot but has been dealing with hamstring issues since week three, while Douglas missed over a month with a foot injury. 5) Our tight end is struggling in his first season as a starter, while the veteran backup we signed in free agency is really a blocker, not a receiving threat. All three of our TEs from the 2012 playoffs are now gone. Obviously you can't easily replace a Tony Gonzalez, but Michael Palmer had been a rock solid "hybrid" type for us, and we chose to let him walk away in free agency. We also opted not to resign pure receiving TE Chase Coffman this season. So while the WRs are hobbling along, Ryan has also been without a sure-handed TE to help him out over the middle.
PLEASE don't fire Mike Smith. The interim coach would be Mike Nolan or Terry Robiskie. Nobody wants that.
