5 quotes from Falcons HC Arthur Smith’s Monday press conference

“We will have some very intense meetings in the next couple of days. Obviously, I know where we’re at. We understand, too, that we’ve been in some close games lately and we need to get back over the hump. There will be changes made. Everything that we decide to do I will be as transparent as possible.”

“Marcus isn’t even in the building today, his wife went into labor this morning. So, congrats to him hopefully. They haven’t had the baby yet but it’ll be his first child. So there’s things like that that come up.”

“You don’t want to look like you’re just blaming one person, and if you think it’s the best thing for you at that moment then, yeah, we’re going to do that. That’s what you’re paid to do, but circumstances are very different today than they were a couple weeks ago.”

“What you don’t want is to have a knee-jerk reaction, which I don’t think, after 13 games, that you are. What we try to do every Monday is be objective and tell the truth in the meetings, and there’s a way to do that without taking shots at anybody’s dignity or whatever. We’ll never do that. It’s called coaching, you know, and being objective and coaching things.”

“You can you’re close all day, but we need to get back into that win column. There are some things that are trending in the right direction that give you a chance every week. But there’s certain things that we need to enhance, and we will.”