Falcons Owner Was Asked About The Deshaun Watson Rumors
The Falcons were one of the teams involved in the pursuit of Deshaun Watson. For a while even, it looked like Atlanta was the perceived favorite to acquire the quarterback.
Watson is a Georgia native, and the opportunity to play close to home reportedly appealed to the three-time Pro Bowler. In the end, Watson was traded from the Houston Texans to the Cleveland Browns, and he promptly signed a five-year, $230 million extension with his new team.
Despite how strongly the Falcons were linked to Watson, Falcons owner Arthur Blank tried to downplay his team’s interest in the controversial signal caller.
“We explored it enough to where we spent some time with him for maybe an hour and 15 minutes,” Blank said, via D. Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He and his agent and trainer or something. So I mean it got to that stage. So it was a worthwhile use of our time. We had an opportunity to understand [things] from his perspective and ask some questions and what have you. But after that, we didn’t have any really further interaction with either the Texans to speak of or with his agent.”
Watson missed the entire 2021 season due to nearly two dozen civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault and misconduct. Two grand juries declined to charge him with any criminal wrongdoing, but he is still facing the civil claims and a possible NFL suspension.
“Well, we did enough at that point from a legal perspective in talking to a number of people to feel — at least to just have a conversation with him — that it was worthwhile doing at that point,” Blank said of the Falcons’ digging on Watson. “One of the criminal cases, one large criminal case (had) been dropped or had been found not guilty by the grand jury. The second one was a little bit later. So we were comfortable with that. But we had a lot questions to go through if we were really going to go down that path and follow it super seriously.”
After missing out on Watson, the Falcons traded Matt Ryan to the Indianapolis Colts and signed Marcus Mariota to presumably be the team’s starter in 2022.
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