Arthur Blank comes clean on NFL tampering punishment

Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank broke his silence on the team’s punishment for tampering with three players before free agency. While speaking to Atlanta reporters this week, Blank explained why the NFL punished the Falcons.

“So, the tampering situation, we were advised by the NFL that we didn’t dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T,’ despite our attempt to do that,” Blank said, per Pro Football Talk. “There were a couple of procedural mistakes, I think, that were made by the organization. We fully cooperated with the NFL, as we always do in any sort of investigation. They found there were certain things were deficient in the way we handled things with Kirk [Cousins]. We’ve addressed those things internally.

“Find something that’s a problem, you fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again, and that’s our attitude about it. The NFL is certainly doing their job and doing it well.”

As Blank mentioned, Cousins was one of the players in question along with Darnell Mooney and Charlie Woerner. The NFL took a fifth-round pick in next year’s draft from Atlanta, as well as finning the team $250,000. Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot was fined $50,000 by the league.

When Cousins had his introductory press conference, he said that he met with Falcons officials before free agency officially began. “You look around and you think, ‘Boy, there’s great people here,'” Cousins said at the time, per CBS News. “And it’s not just the football team. I mean, I’m looking at the support staff. Meeting – calling, yesterday, calling our head athletic trainer, talking to our head of PR, I’m thinking, ‘We got good people here.'”

Arthur Blank: ‘Kirk Cousins is our franchise quarterback’

It’s been an interesting offseason for the Falcons, along with the tampering punishment, Atlanta shocked the football world when they drafted quarterback Michael Penix Jr. a month after signing Cousins to a four-year $180 million contract. Blank was asked about the move and made a strong stance on Cousins.

“Kirk Cousins is our franchise quarterback, is our starting quarterback and he seems to be doing great from a medical standpoint,” Blank said, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “His attitude, his leadership, culturally, personally, with our players, with the coaching staff, has been nothing short of outstanding. So, we couldn’t be happier with that situation. But, you know, I know age does kind of creep up. I can speak myself personally on that a little bit. I know what that means. Kirk will be 36 at the start of the season. We hope and pray he’s got three to four great years in front of him, maybe beyond that. Who knows? But we also know that at some point, there will be a point that we’ll need a transition.”