The Falcons have turned the keys over to an entirely new front office, one with a first-time general manager but a ton of experienced evaluators, including Terry Fontenot himself. What we don’t know is whether that experience is going to translate into better results in the draft.
Remember, the pretty consistent knock on former general manager Thomas Dimitroff was not that he didn’t know his way around a draft class, but that the team too often squandered late round picks and whiffed on the lines. That reputation was somewhat dented by Dimitroff nailing the Jake Matthews and Chris Lindstrom selections and scooping up late round contributors like Foye Oluokun and Russell Gage in recent years, but on balance I think Dimitroff’s legacy in Atlanta should be that he was a good drafter who gambled freely with picks and was undone more by his consistent inability to land impact free agents than what he did in April.