It’s time for the Falcons to fire Dan Quinn, if not past time

It doesn’t matter how logical keeping Dan Quinn was this year. It doesn’t matter how reluctant Arthur Blank might be to fire his hand-picked head coach. It doesn’t matter how many injuries pile up, with Matt Ryan and Ito Smith being added to the pile here in 2019.

What matters is that the Falcons have achieved the kind of ineptitude that would be bitterly disappointing during the worst eras of Falcons football, much less in a season where the team assured us they would contend and spend and drafted like they expected to do just that. Several analysts have called this one of the worst-coached teams they’ve ever seen, and every Falcons fan who had real misgivings about this team heading into the year have been proven right to a degree I’m not sure even the most dour man or woman among us could have foreseen. The decision to stick with Quinn had a lot to do with Super Bowl-driven loyalty and this team’s apparently strong talent base, and with both of those disappointing in the extreme, there’s nothing left to fall back on. This team is awful, and it’s getting worse and worse as the season wears on. There isn’t an owner in the NFL

That means it’s time to fire Dan Quinn. It was probably time when the team utterly failed to show up against Houston, but now that Arthur Blank has hinted and then come out and said that he’s closely watching to see how the Falcons fared heading into the bye, it’s time. The Falcons are 1-6 and absolutely dead in the water, all their high-priced and highly-touted players struggling to some extent, and the listlesness and awful play becoming utterly unbearable. This team is too good with Matt Ryan and Julio Jones and Jake Matthews and Grady Jarrett and Deion Jones to be getting blown out every week by teams both good and lousy, and ultimately the blame falls on the man who coaches them and assured the owner he could take over the defense and get better out of them.

Don’t wait until the bye. This season is already over, but the Falcons owe it to all of us to make a change and start taking a harder look at players who could be a bigger part of what I really hope is a brighter future in Atlanta. Especially with Kendall Sheffield, John Cominsky and Brian Hill at least delivering a handful of bright spots here, it’s time to have something to look forward to again.

If it happens after another frustrating loss to the Seahawks, it’ll be too late to help us find some small joy in one of the most miserable seasons I can remember.