Did the Falcons receive lenience for the Shedeur Sanders prank call?

After the Falcons confessed a week ago today that the prank call made during the draft to quarterback Shedeur Sanders traces back to defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich, many in the league wondered whether the Falcons would get a pass.

They didn’t. The team was fined $250,000. Ulbrich personally was fined $100,000. (When comparing the respective holdings of the Falcons and Ulbrich, one of those punishments hurt a lot more than the other.)

The question is whether the league went easy on the Falcons. More specifically, whether it went easier than it would have gone on other teams.

The key here is Rich McKay. Currently the team’s CEO, he’s also the long-time chairman of the NFL’s Competition Committee. Some suspect he adroitly steers the agenda in the direction of the things the Commissioner wants. Which, if so, makes him very valuable to the league office.

It also can come in handy when it’s time for the Falcons to take their medicine.

It started 10 years ago, when the Falcons were caught red-handed for piping fake crowd noise into the Georgia Dome. The punishment for this significant competitive breach was only a $350,000 fine, a fifth-round pick, and a “temporary” suspension of McKay from the Competition Committee. (In contrast, the 49ers lost a 2025 fifth-round pick for a clerical error.)

In 2023, the Falcons received a total fine of $100,000 ($75,000 for the team, $25,000 for former head coach Arthur Smith) for failing to disclose that running back Bijan Robinson had an illness that relegated him to a cameo appearance in a Week 7 game against the Buccaneers. Given the explosion of prop bets and fantasy football, and in light of Robinson’s relevance to such bets, hiding the illness compromised many legal wagers.

In 2024, a $300,000 penalty resulted ($250,000 for the Falcons, $50,000 for G.M. Terry Fontenot) from tampering with three different players: Kirk Cousins, Darnell Mooney, and Charlie Woerner. The league also took another fifth-round from the Falcons. (It was, frankly, one of the most blatant examples of tampering during the 52-hour negotiating window that we’ve ever seen.)

All three of those violations have a potentially significant competitive impact. The punishments, frankly, don’t seem to objectively fit the crimes.

As to the Shedeur Sanders prank call, it was more about the bad look the situation created. Even though the NFL (for some reason) sent Sanders’s contact information directly to roughly 2,000 people.

The NFL, in fining the Falcons and Ulbrich, harped on the disclosure of “confidential” information. Which serves only to prove the point made earlier this week. The ability of Ulbrich’s son to obtain “confidential” information regarding Sanders invites speculation as to other “confidential” information Ulbrich’s son (and other family members of other team employees) may be getting, and using. Particularly when it comes to gambling.

It’s impossible to know whether a team other than the Falcons would have gotten a harsher punishment for the Shedeur Sanders prank call, because there’s no precedent for it. If it ever happens again, there will undoubtedly be a much stronger sanction, since one of the goals of the Falcons’ punishment is to scare everyone else straight.

It’s also impossible to know whether the explanation provided by the Falcons — that Ulbrich’s son just happened to be visiting his parents and just happened to notice an “open iPad” that just happened to be displaying the Wednesday, April 23 email with Sanders’s phone number and just happened to have a sudden impulse in that moment to write down the number for the purposes of making a prank call on Friday, April 25 — is true.

It seems convenient. Frankly, it seems fishy. It seems like there’s more to the story about whether and to what extent Ulbrich’s 21-year-old son had direct access to emails and other confidential information on official iPads and/or email accounts. Still, as to the all-important question of what Jeff Ulbrich knew and when he knew it, the Falcons’ official explanation is that Ulbrich was Sgt. Schulz.

And maybe that’s where the truth as to the Falcons’ punishment is subtly lurking. If the Falcons’ explanation is true, and given that the league foolishly sent Sanders’s update number to the nearly 2,000 people (including Ulbrich) who receive the daily transaction report, $350,000 in fines seems like a harsh punishment. If the truth about Ulbrich’s son’s access to confidential information is something other than a series of accidentally-threaded needles, the punishment seems light.

Given the history of the league office’s lenience with the Falcons, we’ll let others decide whether they were punished stiffly for a largely innocent gaffe — or whether they were given a softer punishment for something more deliberate than a chain of sitcom-style coincidences.

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