Falcons president’s crazy story of throwing intel from Superdome roof

At the conclusion of their season, the Atlanta Falcons split their leadership by separating their CEO and president titles. Rich McKay held the two positions but he handed off the business side of things to Greg Beadles.

Beadles recently met with two of the Falcons insiders—Scott Bair and Tori McElhaney—to discuss his crazy journey from starting out as an intern to being named team president the other day.

Falcons’ new president used to throw socks full of intel from the Superdome roof down to the field for the coaches

Greg Beadles, the newly named president of the Atlanta Falcons, went on the official podcast of the team to discuss his career with the franchise.

In summary, he started as an intern with the team in 1995. He had to do some random jobs throughout the years and one of those was taking pictures pre and post-snap during the games so the coaches and players had something to analyze mid-game. This was, obviously, prior to the age of advanced electronics, so there were no Microsoft Surfaces where you could get instant access to replays.

Beadles would take pictures, then print them on fax paper, and hand them to the ‘runner’ who would take them and sprint the pictures all to way down to the coaches on the field level. Sometimes, those coaches would get a little heated and want the pictures faster, so they always had to innovate.

Must Read: Falcons RG Chris Lindstrom ends NFL season as highest-graded player.

When they would travel to the Superdome in New Orleans, they had to do things much differently. He explained how the endzone cameras were way up near the ‘700 level.’ You also basically had to crawl through air ducts to access them. With that setup, it created an issue where it took far too long to get the printed images down to the coaches (he said it took 20 minutes to get them down to the field level, but that was probably a back-of-the-envelope calculation).

You can probably see where this is going; they fixed this problem by grabbing an athletic sock, putting a bar of soap in it, putting the pictures in, tying the sock, and during timeouts, they would make sure no refs or anyone was in the way, and launch the sock down to the field where they would then be retrieved. Keep in mind that they were throwing them from up near the rafters and the Superdome is listed as being 273 feet tall.

So, the players and coaches got their intel from socks full of soap that were just thrown from 200 feet above them. Is that legal? I have absolutely no idea, but it is an incredible story.

Just imagine you were at the game just minding your own business during a timeout and all of a sudden you see this projectile sock go flying through the dome. What would you think?! Someone got mad and decided to throw their sock with something in it? Who knows, but it isn’t like you could get on your phone and ask the internet why you saw what you saw.