Thomas Dimitroff: Don’t count out wily tradesmith Thomas Dimitroff

If there’s one thing Thomas Dimitroff and the Falcons front office love more than anything else, it’s the thought of trading on draft day. That doesn’t mean they love doing it—they’ve made plenty of moves up and a small handful down, but they also have held stood pat more often in the first round than not—but they love not ruling out the possibility.

This time out, Dimitroff was careful to say how expensive it would be for the Falcons to move up, particularly if they were chasing Chase Young, the apple of the fanbase’s collective eye. He was also careful not to rule out some kind of move down, even if that was a rare scenario.

“That said, it is one of those draft situations where, given some of the depth in some of these positions, it does set up the opportunity to potentially move back. And you know, as long as I’ve been here, we’ve not been a real active team moving back. But again, this year may be one of those years that you could truly look at that and obviously acquire a couple more picks in different parts in the draft to use up to pair together to get up, of course, in another round.”

Even if he’s playing coy this year, as always, I don’t think Dimitroff truly wants to stake his job security on the kind of swing into the top 10 that a guy like Chase Young or a Jeff Okudah. The Falcons made a purposeful trade to pick up a 2nd for Mohamed Sanu, and this draft is deep enough to use all their picks to address a seemingly ever-growing list of needs.

It’s not necessarily Julio Jones 2.0 time, in other words.

“We spent a lot of time back in 2011 analyzing our situation and knowing where the organization was, of course. Knowing the talent we had. Knowing where the contracts were and the length of contracts. It takes a lot of research in that way to decide whether if you’re going to make a once-in-a-career type move.

”Organizationally speaking, you don’t make those moves all of the time. They are really thought-out decisions.”

Will the Falcons make a big move up? The odds are against it given the number of needs and the very real cap crunch this team is experiencing. You can never entirely rule it out with this front office, though, and that’s exactly the way they like it.