On Monday, a report emerged that Matt Ryan hopes to stay at CBS if/when he becomes the new president of football operations with the Falcons. On Tuesday, a report emerged that Ryan won’t try to pull double duty.
Per multiple sources, Ryan was never planning to do both.
Making the situation even stranger is the fact that the same reporter — Tom Pelissero of NFL Media — was responsible for both reports.
As one source put it, it’s not about the obvious conflict of interest that emerges when someone who is covering the entire league is employed by (or owns a piece of) one of its teams. Ryan wouldn’t stay at CBS because he’ll be fully focused on the Falcons if he gets the job, showing up every day in an effort to help the team be as competitive as it can be.
Which puts him in stark contrast to Tom Brady, who is both working for Fox and is a central figure in the management of the Raiders’ organization.
Good for Ryan to realize there’s only one way to do the job. Employees resent nothing more than someone who isn’t there every day telling the folks who are what they need to be doing. There’s value in being present, being plugged in, and being able to understand the day-to-day realities of the various issues and questions and problems a team faces.
It remains to be seen whether Ryan has the skills to lead a football operation. He has equity (not the ownership kind, at least not yet) in Atlanta given his years spent there as a player, the same as John Elway did in Denver. But let’s be realistic about both situations. Other teams weren’t clamoring to hire Elway to be a General Manager (maybe they should have been, given that he built a team that won a Super Bowl), and Ryan isn’t in Harbaugh-style demand to shift from quarterback to TV analyst to high-level front-office executive.
That doesn’t mean it won’t work for Ryan and the Falcons. But if it doesn’t, it won’t be because Ryan didn’t put in the work.