Inside Matt Ryan’s Wild First Weeks as Falcons President of Football

Super Bowl LX is just days away from kicking off, and the media world has descended on the San Francisco market for the annual media days ahead of Sunday’s game. Atlanta Falcons president of football, Matt Ryan, has been taking advantage of this opportunity. He has made the rounds on the national networks, with one stop coming with ESPN personality Pat McAfee, host of The Pat McAfee Show.

The interview was very light-hearted, but also very enlightening. Ryan spoke freely about the process that he underwent after taking on his position, and subsequently diving into a whirlwind of a process as he hired a new head coach and general manager over the ensuing weeks.

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As someone who had never held a role like this, he was initially apprehensive about his experience, but he called the chance to take on this new role a “one-of-one” opportunity that he just could not pass up.

“This opportunity came up, and I was like, ‘I gotta go for this and go do it and be back in the building every day,’” he explained. “There is something to [being back in an NFL building].”

The former franchise quarterback went through the interview process, but the wild ride began from the moment he was hired.

“I got hired on Friday night. I showed up to the facility on Saturday morning and did my HR hiring training,” Ryan joked. “And then I was on a head coaching interview like 15 minutes after I was done with the training, and obviously, I have never done that. You’re on this [call], and you’re like, ‘okay, this is interesting to see how this is going.’”

But for Ryan, a guy who played in the NFL for 14 years and won an MVP, getting to the heart of who his candidates were and what they would bring the Falcons was like riding a bike.

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“You dive into what you know! And when you’ve been around it [the NFL] for a long time, you start getting into the conversation,” he explained. “You’re talking about football, and what your plans are, what you think about offensive football, and what you think about defensive football. You get into what you know pretty quickly.”

He said the goal was not to get too complicated with the process, and it paid off. The Falcons landed two of the top options on the market, hiring Ian Cunningham as general manager and Kevin Stefanski as head coach.

It’s been a whirlwind first month for Ryan, but now the real work begins, and the Falcons shift from transition to construction.