ATLANTA — The Atlanta Falcons stunned fans Thursday night after they selected quarterback Michael Penix Jr. during the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft.
The Dirty Birds chose Penix with the eighth pick. Many fans took to social media to describe the move as "shocking."
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However, Falcons General Manager Terry Fontenot and Head Coach Raheem Morris explained why they chose Penix.
Why did the Falcons draft a QB?
During a Thursday night press conference, Fontenot began by saying he was very excited about the outcome of being able to add Penix to the roster.
"When you can add a high caliber player like that with his intangibles, those tools, he's a winner," Fontenot said. "You don't pass up that opportunity."
Fontenot and Morris also emphasized their confidence in Kirk Cousins as the Falcons' quarterback.
"We're very excited about Kirk, very excited about this team. And Michael Penix is talking about the future," Fontenot added. "The draft is, you look at the future, and you look at the big picture. But we are very excited about that quarterback room. And again, Kirk is our quarterback, but adding Michael Penix is thinking about the future."
Coach Morris reiterated those same sentiments.
"When you get Kirk Cousins and you talk about short-term winning, you talk about winning right now, which we know we're going to be in a position to do, which we want to be in a position to do," Morris said. "We won't have the ability to be picking this high again with the guy that we got. And these guys go off the board pretty quickly and we thought it would be important for us to address our future quarterback right now, where we're picking this low in these moments and to be able to move forward."
Morris said for the team to move forward, they need to be thinking about the future now.
"We got a guy that can go out there and win football games and we should be picking high enough. We talk about winning the (NFC) South. We talked about doing some of these things that includes going to the playoffs," Morris said. "We're in the position to win. We put ourselves in a position to win. These guys have done a great job of doing that and that helped us make that decision. And it made it pretty definitive in our building for us."
You can watch Fontenot and Morris' full remarks in the video below: