{"id":726198,"date":"2026-02-03T12:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T12:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/726198\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T12:21:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T12:21:00","slug":"falcons-promote-tokunbo-abanikanda-to-director-of-scouting-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/726198\/","title":{"rendered":"Falcons promote Tokunbo Abanikanda to director of scouting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">General managers may come and go, but front office staff can remain through those changes. Longtime Falcons scout and director of college scouting Anthony Robinson, who is now with the Rams, is an example of a key executive who stuck around after Thomas Dimitroff was fired in a major role.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Tokunbo Abanikanda is following that path. He\u2019s been with the Falcons since 2012 in scouting roles, taking on a national scout promotion in 2021, earning a promotion to director of college scouting in 2024, and now earning a promotion to director of scouting under new general manager Ian Cunningham. As a longtime scout in the southeast, he had an up-close look at some of the best programs in college football, and there\u2019s little question Abanikanda had a role in the team\u2019s fantastic, SEC-heavy draft haul from 2025.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">It speaks well to Abanikanda\u2019s acumen that a new GM came in and he was immediately promoted to a role overseeing the organization\u2019s scouting across the board, especially with a general manager who has a strong college scouting background of his own. Hopefully he\u2019ll be instrumental as the Falcons create a deeper, stronger roster in the months and years ahead under Cunningham and Matt Ryan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"General managers may come and go, but front office staff can remain through those changes. Longtime Falcons scout&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2074],"tags":[223,254,2591,2554,224,7,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-726198","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-falcons","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-falcons","10":"tag-atlanta-falcons-news","11":"tag-atlantafalcons","12":"tag-falcons","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116006674998572789","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}