Every team in the league was forced to come up with an offseason plan on the fly.
So it almost makes sense — as much as anything makes sense — that one team was inspired by a star of a live television show.
Falcons coach Dan Quinn told Albert Breer of SI.com that he got some good advice from Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson on how they could improve their virtual offseason, which cause him to change the way he approached it.
“Trying to do comedy online is hard,” Quinn said. “They’d done a Saturday Night Live from home. And so we’d asked, ‘What’s hard about it?’ He goes, ‘You don’t know if the joke is funny, because you don’t hear anybody laughing, because their mics aren’t on.’
“So learning some of the technology was fun, and sometimes before meetings we’d just have open mics so you could talk s--t and have fun like a locker room does. And then I’d have to hold up the sign: OK, mics off, cameras on, let’s go.”
Thompson was one of many guests brought in to try to help, from four-star generals, to a number of former players.
But that camaraderie in the locker room is one thing that can’t be replicated in any Zoom meeting, so letting players have some fun with each other at least approximated the experience.