Arthur Blank wants Falcons to be tougher, suggests they’ll draft lineman
By Mike Dyce
The Atlanta Falcons struggled this season after making the NFC Championship game last season. Falcons owner Arthur Blank said he wants his team to get tougher, and that starts along the line of scrimmage.
“I think the nature of the game is that it’s a physically violent game,” Blank said, via Vaughn McClure of ESPN.com “It is a tough game. To play football on the professional level and the college level or even the high school level, you’ve got to be a tough kid. You’ve got to be a tough person, I think. And I think a lot of our players are certainly that.
“I think, at the end of the day, if I asked you, . . . give me a brief definition of what toughness is, I think you might say something else, but you might say to me it’s how you control the line of scrimmage. Can you run the ball? Can you stop the run? . . .
“And I don’t think we did either one of those things very well this year. So I would say, if you looked at toughness from that perspective, I don’t think we were as tough as we needed to be.”
He also said that he doesn’t want to sacrifice character for toughness though and end up in a situation like the Miami Dolphins.