PALM BEACH, Fla. — It was summer in South Florida, Matt Ryan was still the Falcons’ quarterback, and after the team’s joint practice with Miami, Dolphins general manager Chris Grier went to his new Atlanta counterpart, Terry Fontenot, to give the first-year GM the proverbial pat on the back.
Grier was right. The Falcons found a way to win seven games, and if you looked hard enough at how the season went, you might’ve come out of it convinced that Atlanta was indeed closer than people had thought six months after that conversation. They even beat that Dolphins team, one that sure looked like the more talented group in August, two months after Grier offered Fontenot that small piece of encouragement.
Fontenot wasn’t fooled, though. He knew a reckoning was coming. And the truth in the Ryan trade of last week is that a year in as Falcons GM and coach, he and Arthur Smith simply went through with a conscious decision—the time for that reckoning was now.
That didn’t make trading away a 14-year veteran and face of the franchise—one who helped dig the Falcons out of a deep ditch back in 2008—any easier. But where it might’ve appeared that Atlanta’s failed run at Deshaun Watson forced the team’s hand on Ryan, the facts were that the calls that Fontenot and Smith made last Monday, the former to Colts GM Chris Ballard and the latter to Ryan himself, were 14 months in the making.
But now that it’s done, the Falcons’ rebuild is underway.
We’re about to tell you the story of how it happened.
