After the Atlanta Falcons started the season 1-7, many fans and analysts assumed that head coach Dan Quinn would soon be out of a job.
Nope.
Falcons owner Arthur Blank elected to stick with Quinn.
“Well, it wasn’t a tough decision to stay with Dan; it was a tough decision to say with that level of performance,” Blank said on Tiki & Tierney. “Dan’s an outstanding human being, whether he’s a head coach or the head of anything else. He’s just a special person. Having said that, we’re in a performance-driven business.”
Quinn is 43-37 in five seasons in Atlanta and 3-2 in the playoffs. In 2016, he led the Falcons to the Super Bowl, where they ultimately lost to the New England Patriots.
After that 1-7 start this season, though, the Falcons turned things around in a hurry. In fact, they went 6-2 over their final eight games and beat the Saints in New Orleans and the 49ers – yes, the 49ers – in Santa Clara.
“Dan, he’s a very self-aware person, a very self-critical person,” Blank said. “He made some decisions with the coaching changes and other changes and moved some players around as well. He took some pressure off himself from calling defensive signals and allowed other people to participate in that.”
In the end, the decision to stick with Quinn, who was the Seahawks’ defensive coordinator when Seattle won Super Bowl XLVIII, wasn’t difficult.
“I think Dan demonstrated, ‘I can make the adjustments. I can make the fixes. I’ve made those changes,’” Blank said. “It’s easy to talk about them, but can you demonstrate them on the field? [Going] 6-2 [in the second half], going from 31st in the league on defense to eighth in the league on defense, and still scoring a lot of points – I think we had the fifth-most points in the league last year. The offense has really not been the issue or the problem. It’s hard to say it would be with Matt and Julio and Cal Ridley and other players as well. So I have every reason to think that second half of the year will foretell what we’ll see this coming season.”