ATLANTA — The Atlanta Falcons executed a major housecleaning on Monday, relieving all three positional coordinators of their duties just one day after concluding a 7-9 season.
Steve Sarkisian (offense), Marquand Manuel (defense) and Keith Armstrong (special teams) will not be with the team, moving forward.
As such, the duo of general manager Thomas Dimitroff and head coach Dan Quinn will now be tasked with filling three substantial staff vacancies, perhaps looking for outside help.
For what it's worth, Dimitroff and Quinn both signed three-year contract extensions last summer, which likely explains why they weren't among the casualties in Flowery Branch.
Here's the official statement from Quinn, the Falcons' head coach since 2015:
"All three of these men are excellent coaches that I have a lot of respect for. While these are difficult decisions, we know we have a group of players here we are excited about and in order for us to consistently play true to our identity in all three phases we thought we needed some changes."
Which brings us to this:
Eight teams are now looking for head coaches (Bengals, Cardinals, Packers, Jets, Browns, Dolphins, Buccaneers, Broncos), one of the cold realities of the so-called Black Monday.
And charting the above clubs, all eight franchises have missed the NFL playoffs for a minimum of two seasons.
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The Falcons, of course, were prominent postseason fixtures of the previous two years, losing the Super Bowl in heartbreaking fashion (February 2017) and incurring a late loss to the eventual-champion Eagles (January 2018).
So, in that vein, it would have been unreasonable to drop Quinn after an injury-wrecked campaign (losing Deion Jones, Devonta Freeman, Grady Jarrett, Keanu Neal for substantial time).
However, this doesn't mean that owner Arthur M. Blank had to sit idly by and watch the Falcons fall woefully short of the Super Bowl hype from just four months ago.
As such, Quinn was likely ordered to make sweeping changes, as a means of his own self-preservation.