re: How are they going to match up?

quote:

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smith needs this one to save his bacon, he's pulling out all the stops.

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Been quiet on a lot of the Smith hate. He's a close friend of my dad's and he helped me a lot with training to be a LB in high school during the summers. I can tell you emphatically he's a fantastic coach; he's not the one to get up in your face, or rally you with a half-time speech, but he's a great coach in the NFL. He expects players to be professionals and want to win as much as he does - but I think Atlanta has a bunch of character issues in their ranks. New Orleans, for the most part, appears to pay heavy attention to the personality of a player before they lunge for them. Other than Julio Jones, a lot of their picks have been abysmal. I think Smitty is just getting a lot of the heat for Dimitroff's follies. Part of me wants the Falcons to fail, part of me sympathizes with him as a coach.