REBELS: How Terry Fontenot, the NFL's most fearless GM, is driving the Atlanta Falcons into title contention
"If you’re worried about pleasing everybody, you’re going to be a failure." He shocks the world every offseason. Now, it's time for the Falcons to win. Go Long sits down with a GM unlike any other.
FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — Football is a testosterone-fueled enterprise. The most alpha of alphas congregate inside a modern-day coliseum to legally whup each other’s asses for three hours. Seventy thousand fans cheer. And boo. And curse. And burn through their kids’ college funds on NFL-sanctioned gambling apps while sipping an $18 beer.
Football weeds out the physically and mentally fragile with its participants chiseling their bodies into killing machines year ‘round.
There doesn’t appear to be any room for emotional sensitivities, but you’d be surprised. Those who profess to “ignore the noise” in public too often seethe in private. OK, it’s hard to blame the Gen Z athlete who had an iPhone stuffed into his hand at age 9, but even the sport’s middle-aged lifers too often allow eggheads with 14 followers to rent space in their brain. Public perception becomes an obsession. GMs and coaches morph into politicians, skewing toward the safe choice. The popular choice. Whatever keeps their poll numbers high.
Then, there’s the general manager of the Atlanta Falcons.
Terry Fontenot does not give a damn what anybody thinks.
The opinions of anyone outside of this building are nothing but spam that land in his junk folder. All mocks, all grades, all takes. The only time the Falcons GM even watches draft coverage is in hindsight. He hits rewind each spring to see what talking heads said about past prospects. It’s always a hilarious exercise, and a friendly reminder that pervasive opinions — on anything in life — can be proven dead wrong.
“There’s an article about the iPhone,” Fontenot says, “and about how it’s stupid and it’ll never work: ‘You can’t have a computer in your pocket.’”
Welcome to an office unlike any in the NFL. Aesthetically, it’s not much different than those occupied by the other 31 GMs. There’s a gorgeous view. There are family photos. One MLK quote hangs on the wall. Understandably, there are a few white hairs sprouting from his goatee that weren’t around the day Fontenot first moved in. All power brokers in a high-stakes sport age faster. But the decisions made between these walls almost always run counter to the rest of the NFL. The Falcons have been rebels under his leadership and, in reality, the rebels should be most relatable. Because if you were an NFL GM, how would you build a winner? Accruing draft capital and overthinking “If X then Y” probabilities through an ultra-analytic, ultra-calculated lens is one way to conduct business. Perhaps there’s a top-secret algorithm inside the file cabinet that worked for a title team in the past. There are owners who prefer a GM with MBA degrees on the wall.
Or you could be Fontenot. Love a player? Draft that player. Sign that player. Light a match to the status quo.
Here, groupthink is toxic.
Here, thinking for yourself is the most treasured virtue.
“We empower our scouts. We empower our coaches. We empower our analytics,” Fontenot says. “We want to have a lot of smart people that are working really hard and are confident enough to not worry about the perception or the outside. We know it wasn’t popular to take Michael Penix last year. But we spent all the time on it and we had faith and belief in this building.
“The confidence in our building, our people and the process that we go through? We can ignore that outside and do everything we can do that we believe is going to get us to that championship that we’re seeking.”
This offseason, Go Long flew to Atlanta to get inside the mind of the NFL’s most fearless general manager.
Fontenot takes everyone through the seismic decisions he believes will vault the Falcons into NFC contention.