Thomas Dimitroff suggests Falcons' front office pushed Arthur Blank not to hire Bill Belichick
Why didn't the Falcons hire Bill Belichick as their new head coach? It may have been because the Falcons' front office isn't big enough for both Belichick and the staff that has been built under Falcons CEO Rich McKay.
Thomas Dimitroff, who was the Falcons' General Manager from 2008 to 2020, told 98.5 The Sports Hub that the inner circle of the Falcons' front office let Falcons owner Arthur Blank know they didn't want Belichick coming in and shaking things up.
“But in the end, there was an inner group in there, right?” Dimitroff said, via Boston.com. “Look, any time Bill goes into an organization, you would assume whatever your thoughts are about him, he deserves the right to run it. . . . Maybe there was a group inside the building who kept pushing back to Arthur. Let’s call it the way it is. Any organization wants to keep their world, right? Presidents want to keep their world.”
Dimitroff said Belichick and McKay wouldn't have worked together.
“You saw the discussion about Rich McKay, right?” Dimitroff said. “Rich is very talented. He knows a lot. The fact that he and Bill would have to work together — or not work together — wasn’t going to happen. And Arthur had made a bold statement saying, ‘That was not an issue.'”
But Dimitroff said that if Belichick is going to land somewhere, he's going to overhaul the franchise whether the executives in place like it or not.
“I think everyone looks at it like, ‘Yeah, but when you get someone like [Belichick] in there, it’s going to be overhauled eventually," Dimitroff said.
Belichick may hope that in 2025, some owner is willing to hire him to take over a team, and run every aspect of that team his way.
