FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — The Atlanta Falcons' hiring of Ian Cunningham as general manager on January 29 was widely viewed as a shrewd move due to his well-earned experience across 18 years with three respected organizations. In his first NFL Draft in the role, Cunningham synthesized the philosophies of the Baltimore Ravens, Philadelphia Eagles and Chicago Bears to continue establishing the Falcons' new identity.
Cunningham spent nine seasons with the Baltimore Ravens learning under the famed Ozzie Newsome, a Hall of Fame player who became the NFL's first black general manager and built some of the NFL's most complete rosters en route to winning two Super Bowls during his 17 years in the role.
In a 2013 column for Grantland.com about the Ravens’ consistent success, Bill Barnwell summed up Baltimore's roster-building recipe: "The Ravens truly understand how valuing players has to work in tandem with evaluating players."
Maximizing the value of draft assets and the free agent market helped the Ravens weather roster turnover and consistently field competitive teams. On Day 2 of the 2026 NFL Draft, Cunningham extracted excellent value from his two picks, landing cornerback Avieon Terrell and wide receiver Zachariah Branch, whom many draft experts expected to go much higher.
Warren Sharp, a data analyst who covers the NFL, looked at where players were selected in the draft compared to where they were predicted to go across a composite of mock drafts. He determined the Falcons' selection of Terrell derived the best value in the second round.
Terrell was considered slightly undersized as a cornerback prospect and ran a 4.64-second 40-yard dash during a private workout before the draft, although it's important to note that he aggravated his hamstring on his first run. Those two factors help explain why Terrell was available at pick 48, but the Falcons didn't balk. Terrell's tape at Clemson proved him to be a high-quality football player.
In Baltimore, where Cunningham's front-office journey began, the tape is the trump card.
NFL Media analyst Daniel Jeremiah, who spent four seasons working for Newsome in the Ravens' personnel department, wrote in 2013 of his former boss, "Newsome never got too carried away with height, weight or speed. He wanted football players."
Above all else, Terrell is a football player, and the Falcons saw the opportunity to add an impact contributor at a premium position. They did so at a draft bargain.
The same could be said of Cunningham's second draft pick. In his only year at the University of Georgia, Branch had an SEC-best 81 catches for 811 yards with six touchdowns and averaged 7.8 yards after the catch, which ranked 10th among all FBS receivers.
Branch, who transferred from the University of Southern California for his final college season, was determined to challenge himself and prepare for a future life in the NFL. He chose the Bulldogs because head coach Kirby Smart has created an environment that would allow him to do just that.
"He loves this game, and he loves to be out there and working in practice," Falcons head coach Kevin Stefanski said of Branch. "Coaches appreciate those types of guys that bring it every single day. They bring the juice every single day. So again, that's why I think the fit here – we can talk through the schematic fit – but the personal fit, the culture fit, the fit in our locker room, the fit in what we believe in is really strong."
The Falcons have now drafted a Georgia player in back-to-back drafts, tapping into a pipeline that has had proven success. Perhaps no team has benefited from bringing in Bulldogs more than Cunningham's former club in Philadelphia. Since 2022, the Eagles have selected seven former Georgia players, including offensive lineman Micah Morris in the sixth round of this year's draft.
Although that run began in 2022, after Cunningham left for Chicago, Eagles GM Howie Roseman provided a quote after the 2021 draft that illustrates his mindset.
"Great players, great school, high recruits, play at the highest level, it kind of works," Roseman said, according to Zach Berman, who covers the Eagles for The Athletic.
Branch was the top-rated wide receiver in the 2023 recruiting class and ran the 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine in 4.35 seconds. He has what Stefanski would call a dominant trait, and the film backs up the measurables. Every aspect of Branch fits the quote above from Roseman, but there's another portion of Berman's 2023 article on the Philly-Georgia connection that applies when looking at Cunningham's first draft.
"From 2016 to 2020, the Eagles drafted multiple players from TCU, Auburn, West Virginia, Stanford, Penn State and Washington," Berman writes. "Washington was the only program that reached the College Football Playoff during that period. In the three years since, Georgia and Alabama have been the only programs from which the Eagles have drafted multiple players. They've made up 38 percent of the team's picks."
Now consider the schools Atlanta pulled from in the 2026 draft: Clemson, Georgia, Oklahoma, Washington, LSU and Ohio State. All are top college football programs striving for championships year in and year out. Stefanski has said he'd like a "player-driven culture," in which teammates push one another to be the best versions of themselves. Adding players like Branch from the most competitive college environments will help the Falcons build that culture.
"What they've done and what they continue to do at Georgia, they're always going to have really good football players," Cunningham said during draft weekend. "And it's cool that it's right in our backyard. So, we're going to continue to build those relationships and foster those relationships there."
After landing two well-known prospects on Day 2, the Falcons used their first Day 3 pick on a player that fans may have been less familiar with. Linebacker Kendal Daniels spent his final season at Oklahoma after four years at Oklahoma State and was not discussed much by draft pundits throughout the offseason. However, the 6-foot-5, 242-pound converted safety fits the mold of an emerging defensive archetype.
Cunningham understands the value in deploying a hyper-long, rangy linebacker on defense after watching Tremaine Edmunds make play after play for the Chicago Bears the last three seasons. Edmunds, who is 6-foot-4, 251 pounds, has started 45 games for the Bears since 2023 and racked up 335 tackles, 11 tackles for a loss and 9 interceptions, most among linebackers in that time.
As NFL offenses strive to create matchup advantages through personnel groupings, formations and pre-snap motions, defenses have sought to adapt by adding players with high versatility, sometimes referred to as positionless players. Given his legitimate coverage background, Daniels fits that description. His final year at school showed he could maintain his athleticism while adding weight to facilitate a move to linebacker.
Those are important factors for defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich, who has a track record of success with players like Daniels.
When the Bears added Edmunds as a free agent in 2023, GM Ryan Poles cited "the length, the speed, the coverage ability in terms of just the space that he covers," as key reasons for doing so, according to Colleen Kane of the Chicago Tribune. After selecting Daniels in the fourth round, Cunningham provided a similar explanation.
"You see him play all over the field, stacked and the apex and sometimes even the line deep. He's a rare athlete," he said. "When you watch the tape, the movement, the length, the fluidity, he can do a lot of things for you on defense."
In his first draft as Falcons GM, Cunningham patiently allowed Terrell and Branch to fall into his lap, adding two proven football players from first-rate college programs at premium positions. He then took players who showed tenacity in college and possess intriguing physical tools for the modern game worth developing, headlined by Daniels at a position the Falcons needed to bolster.
It's too soon to know the complete story of the Falcons' 2026 draft class, but its architect used a blueprint built over years working with some of the very best.
