Falcons’ Raheem Morris shares confidence level entering Year 1 as he prepares team to win, stay winners

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 are good for the third-most in the entire league, according to CBS Sports Research’s count.

Just look at the offensive side of the ball. First-year offensive coordinator is Zach Robinson and behind him is quarterbacks coach TJ Yates. DJ Williams is the assistant QB coach, then veteran coach Ken Zampese as the 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 the two offensive assists.

When I sat down with Morris during the Falcons’ one-day minicamp in June, I asked him why he thought he needed such a large staff. He admits that snobbery can be a little… snobbish.

“It’s the sacrifice of knowing that you’re going to be good. There’s a little bit of ego that goes with it, too, right?” Morris said from his office. “We’re going to lose good coaches. And I would like to be able to replace them. I would like to be able to hire people who are training and constantly developing for those roles.

“When you do that, you don’t come into this thing hoping that you can win. You come into this thing knowing that you can win. And when you know you can win, So you’ll lose people who are curious about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and I want to be ready for that.’

Morris’s beliefs come from experience. He was on Sean McVay’s staff for three seasons, including a Super Bowl-winning season, and saw talented coaches poached. In his first tour of duty in Atlanta, he recalls the 2016 Falcons staff, which lost Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Mike LaFleur, Mike McDaniels and Bobby Turner after their Super Bowl run.

Whether you believe the 2024 Falcons are a legitimate contender for the Lombardi race, clearly they are. He believes they are close. They see an NFC South that could be snatched away from the Buccaneers, who themselves have been winners of a weak division three years in a row.

Over those same three years, the Falcons have posted the same 7-10 mark under longtime head coach Arthur Smith. Last year’s group managed to defeat most of its opponents with winning records, but posted a terrible 2-6 record against those with losing records.

This is the year to add skill positions through the draft; So much so that former No. 4 overall pick Kyle Pitts could be the No. 4 option in this offense. This is building a solid offensive line that can be effective in the run and pass game. But it’s also putting so much faith in the group there that you can use the eighth overall pick on a quarterback six weeks after guaranteeing someone else $100 million. (More on that a little later.)

Much of this expected success hinges on Kirk Cousins, who, when I visited in June, was performing slightly above my expectations on the field. It’s a glorified rehearsal as the only day of minicamp, but more than seven months after Achilles surgery, the 35-year-old is taking all his dropbacks and even getting in some bootleg action.

“Ah, no. I mean, I can move, I can move,” Cousins ​​says to me after practice when I register my surprise. “I think what I’ve learned is that going from the day of surgery to about 90 percent of the time is a very steady process. That last 10 percent feels like most of the journey. ‘I can do almost everything’ “With ‘almost’ removed, it seems like a big hurdle to overcome.”

Then Cousins ​​wouldn’t say whether he was at the 90 percent limit or not, but he was balancing how much to push himself. Doctors told him it would take nine months to recover – he had surgery on November 1 – but in many ways he wouldn’t feel normal for 12 months.

While with the Vikings last summer, Cousins ​​hired a bodywork coach who was actually from the Atlanta area. They work together with three sessions almost every day, trying different rest and recovery methods.

No one would be surprised if Cousins ​​doesn’t play in any of the three preseason games, but he told me he expects to be ready for Week 1 and that he’s “trending toward being ready” in Atlanta’s opener against the Steelers. are doing.

Morris would tell local media that it’s hard for him to say that Cousins ​​is limited, even if he knows he is limited. Obviously, they haven’t done anything around him, and they’ve been careful about the plays he’s made so far.

Remember, it was traditional Achilles surgery, not the new-age SpeedBridge procedure that got Aaron Rodgers cleared by his doctor to play after three months.

Isn’t it human nature, I ask Cousins, to put a little more pressure on himself after the team selected Michael Penix Jr. in April’s draft? After signing a four-year, $180 million contract to become the franchise quarterback — and leaving Minnesota partly because you couldn’t get that assurance there — isn’t a quarterback selected in the top 10 of the draft light sooner rather than later? Do you have an even bigger fire inside you to perform physically on the field?

“I think I’m naturally a pusher,” Cousins ​​said. “So if anything in this rehab was about pushing it to the line, the concern for me wasn’t ‘Will I push hard enough?’ The concern was ‘How quickly? How hard will I try to cross the line?’ So it’s quite natural for me to apply pressure, I don’t know that anything external is going to change that.”

General manager Terry Fontenot agrees. He says the enthusiasm Cousins ​​has displayed throughout his career is a big reason the Falcons hitched their wagon to him on the first day of free agency, even though he was coming off an Achilles injury in his age-36 season .

“There doesn’t need to be a carrot in there,” says Fontenot. “That was a big part of determining whether you want to pursue him. You better make sure he has real motivation, that he wants to continue to go to the next step. This guy’s going to do everything he can to win.” Wants what he can to do is go to 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 Matt Ryan’s final years in Atlanta. Fontenot points out that Cousins ​​led the NFL in passing touchdowns before suffering an Achilles tear halfway through the season, highlighting that he is still at the top of his game today with a proven track record of success.

However, apart from that, Cousins ​​is the guy who is at the forefront of the class. A player who takes copious notes in meetings. The Falcons have players like Grady Jarrett and Jake Matthews, as well as others, but getting it from a top player at a key position falls short on the rest of the roster.

This is something that was missing from the Marcus Mariota-Taylor Heinicke-Desmond Ridder experience the past two seasons. But at the same time the team became even more talented. Signing Darnell Mooney and trading for Rondell Moore gave the team more momentum. They have diluted both sides of the line.

Atlanta still probably needs another cornerback opposite AJ Terrell, and the Falcons failed to land Montez Sweat before last year’s trade deadline and traded a first-round back in April’s draft for Liatu Latu. After must continue to pursue a pass rusher. Of course, if they weren’t so sure about Penix they could have moved Latu to No. 8.

There is no doubt that Cousins ​​was troubled by the circumstances surrounding his selection. Some teams draft a quarterback in the top 10 so that he sits for the entire length of the veteran’s four-year contract. And maybe it would have been nice to take a little care before the draft.

The Falcons gave Cousins ​​some minutes, but felt that was all he could do in a draft notorious for deception and underhanded dealings. Plus, they’re completely convinced that Cousins ​​is *the* guy.

Still, Cousins ​​had what he had to say to all parties in Atlanta following the selection. The conversations remained private, but grievances were clearly aired. Morris talks about not allowing negativity to fill the void, and once Cousins ​​got what he needed off his chest, he got back to work, and not allowing negativity to fill the void. did not allow.

“Our commitment to Kirk is still our commitment to Kirk,” Morris said. “We gave him a pretty good contract that if he goes out there and does his job and he’s able to stay on track, I don’t see what can go wrong. There’s a business aspect, so there’s always relationship-building there. There’s always honesty there.

“There’s a business element to every part of what we do in football. We always like to connect it to our families, but it’s a little bit different from our families because we separate those things from business and family. Here you’ve got to put those things together and be able to fix those things and connect those things through the everyday while keeping the same goal in mind.”

Fontenot was not surprised by the reaction from outside the building after the selection. Hey, he guessed it. Before the draft, Fontenot would sometimes show his scouting staff videos of Techmen around the draft.

Last year, they showed the staff the famous video of Merrill Hoge correctly predicting Johnny Manziel’s career path to the incredible Skip Bayless before the 2014 draft. It’s a reminder to the group to focus on their process, do the right things for the right reasons, and ignore the noise.

After years of wandering in the quarterback wilderness — including former Falcons ballboy Deshaun Watson’s ill-fated late-night run and prayers to third-round pick Ridder that they might be saved — the Falcons needed to make sure they had a solid roster at quarterback. Never be under severe stress. Situation for the near future.

But putting it off for another year wasn’t feasible for a Falcons group that had strong faith in Penix and, as mentioned, some confidence in himself.

“You look at the whole picture and look to the next year,” Fontenot says. “And it’s easy to say, OK, you know what, dude? We’ll move on. We’ll just move Latu here or trade him back and yes, we’ll get a quarterback next year. Okay, fine.

“First of all, we’re going to pick a lot at the end of next year.”