Terry Fontenot talks best player available in light of Atlanta’s current situation

It’s not just about eschewing positional needs, but also looking beyond the current state of the roster, the general manager suggests.

One of the most argued-over terms in the draft lexicon is best player available, a term that either means nothing or everything to you. For Terry Fontenot, it’s an ethos, but one that comes with qualifiers.

Taken at face value, best player available means best player regardless of position and roster need, and perhaps in spite of any off-the-field issues that might be following that player around. In practice, no general manager is making selections purely based on talent, and every team has their own unique way of defining best player available.

Terry Fontenot alluded to that on Tuesday in remarks to the press, talking about how BPA really means BPAFU (heh), or best player available for us. He also touched on something important along the way: Not being too narrow and present-focused when it comes to looking at roster needs.

It’s a fair point. Rookie contracts are either four or five years in length, meaning the player you pick up in 2024 as a backup may have a chance to contend for a starting job in 2025, which is the situation players like Clark Phillips and DeMarcco Hellams find themselves in heading into this season. The needs you have right now may be urgent in the moment, but there may be similarly urgent needs looming a year out that you think the team will be less equipped to deal with, necessitating that you take a long-term view if you’re ocnsidering need at all. Or you can run it as purely as possible, as Fontenot is suggesting here, and think that an elite player at basically any position will fill a need at some point in the not-too-distant future, meaning you should bet on the ability and the fit rather than trying to grab a player you believe is less gifted or has a lower ceiling to plug a hole on the roster. Talent trumps all.

Obviously, the BPA label has qualifiers for the Falcons, as it does for every other team, and that makes it something less than the purest form of the term. The players the Falcons pick in the first round and every round beyond that will be, per the team in the immediate aftermath of those selections, the best players available. Certainly they scooped up a running back and tight end, a pair of positions that almost never go in the top ten, and that alone lends some credence to the idea that they’re trying to hew to that philosophy.

But the “today’s surplus is tomorrow’s necessity” line stands out a bit in all that talk, mostly because of the implication. Fontenot is trying to say to draft the best player available you have to think outside of not just their positions, but also your current and perhaps near-future needs, knowing full well that careers are short, unexpected crises are inevitable, and real contingency plans are vital. This doesn’t mean a ton of the best player available for you is a defensive lineman, given how heavily you rotate those guys and thus give young players a real shot at a role, but it does matter if that player is the most talented fit for your team and is not going to play for a while.

Could Fontenot be alluding to a quarterback? Here’s what he said about that yesterday:

I don’t buy the idea that the Falcons will sink a top ten pick into the quarterback position after signing Kirk Cousins, but I have suspected more or less since they hired Raheem Morris that they’d use this draft to snag a long-term option at the position. That suspicion was only strengthened when the Falcons swapped out their lone possible long-term option, Desmond Ridder, and left themselves with a pair of 30-plus year olds with a plan to not sniff the top 10 in the draft again the next couple of seasons. Whether the pick is Michael Penix in the late first (via trade up) or early second, Bo Nix somewhere in the second or third round, or Spencer Rattler, Michael Pratt, or Joe Milton, I’d be surprised if they didn’t walk away with someone they thought was worth developing as at least a long-term backup.

And that will be somewhat of a needs-based pick, no matter how much talk of best player available comes along with it, and that’s perfectly fine. The Falcons need to add talent to this roster nearly everywhere you can think of, both now and in the future, and the only reason we’ll have to really roll our eyes at the philosophy is if those players don’t pan out. May best player available for us turn out to be some of the best players in this draft class.