BS Report – The Falcons Rebuild
Well, we have the Super Bowl this week with Seattle and New England. Once again, no Atlanta Falcons. But there is good news for the Falcons as Kevin Stefanski, the new head coach, and Matt Ryan, the president of football operations, move forward with their rebuilding project, if you will, for this organization. Ian Cunningham, the assistant general manager of the Chicago Bears, was hired over the weekend.
He is now in charge as the GM. So you have Matt Ryan as president of football, Ian Cunningham as the general manager and Kevin Stefanski as the new head coach. Stefanski is really building a fine coaching staff, which is very important. He brought in Bill Callahan, a longtime offensive line coach, former head coach, the writers. He’s been an offensive coordinator. Close to 70 years old, but a very respected coach in the NFL. He was with Stefanski in Cleveland. He’s going to be there in Atlanta as well. You’ve got several other pieces of the puzzle. Tommy Reese, the former offensive coordinator for Alabama who has been with Cleveland and Stefanski for the last couple of years. Last year as the offensive coordinator. He is going to be the OC in Atlanta. Then over the weekend, the Falcons brought in Alex Van Pelt as the quarterback coach. He is the former offensive coordinator, for Cleveland and Stefanski before they kind of the front office kind of ran Van Pelt off longtime quarterback in the NFL. Back in the 90s, in the early 2000.
Then he was a quarterback coach for the Bengals, the Packers with Aaron Rodgers, the Tampa Bay Bucs, the Buffalo Bills. And it was with the Rams and Sean McVay this past year as a senior offensive assistant. So Alex Van Pelt a very good addition. You have also Tanner strand who is the new offensive passing game coordinator. He was the offensive coordinator of the Jets last year. So he’s got experience as a no. See, you’ve got a very experienced offensive staff. And of course they’re going to be charged with trying to determine the potential and and just their thoughts about Michael Penix. You know Michael Penix Jr, the quarterback is going to be coming back from an injury. So we don’t know about the timetable from that.
That is a big question mark. But what will these new evaluators think of the potential of Michael Penix? That’s the first question this new brass has to really answer, because Penix is a big deal. They drafted him two years ago, number eight overall. He obviously was a starting quarterback going into 2025. Then he got hurt. He didn’t really play well at times, but with the new staff, with new people in charge, a lot of experience with a lot of very good quarterbacks too. By the way, can they make a difference in Michael Penix? That will be something to watch moving forward. The Falcons, of course, already brought back most of their defensive staff with Jeff Albrecht, who, did a good job last year in improving the defense. There will be a little continuity on that side of the ball. There’s also going to be some cap room.
The Falcons are like at 27 million at cap room. They’ll get more cap room when they release Kirk Cousins, which is going to happen before March 13th. And then there was information leaked yesterday that if they restructure the the contracts of A.J. Terrell, Chris Lindstrom, Jake Matthews and Jesse Bates, they can actually free up another 44 million in cap room. So that would give the Falcons a tremendous amount of financial flexibility to go out and add a right tackle, add a defensive tackle. Get a second running back since Tyler Alger will probably leave. Get another wide receiver behind Drake London, which is desperately needed. So they do have the ability to make those moves and to add some free agents when that starts in the month of March.
So there are some good things happening at the with the Falcons. I know it’s yet another Super Bowl where the Falcons are not going to be in there, but I think we need to feel good about the changes that have taken place over the last couple of weeks in Flowery Branch, and what’s to come in the future. With Matt Ryan leading the way as the president of football?
