Because of his injury and our current situation, we felt it was in both of our interests to release Brady at this time. In these salary cap times, you cannot ensure that Brady will not be back as a Falcon before the 2006 season.

He's tough, he has great hands. He is a game-changer on punt returns and kickoff returns.

I think 16 would be a quantum leap, where you're changing the entire outlook of the NFL,

It helps the defense in a sense - I don't want to accuse the offense of stealing signals, let's just assume they're borrowing the signals. We think it would be good to give the defense that ability.

I'm sure there are teams that have room and therefore will be active but I think there will be less activity. There are a lot of teams that won't have room. We'd love to front-load, back-load, do-whatever load but we can't begin to load. We don't have any place to put it.

I'm sure there will be some light shed on that. And I think they're going to do that maybe Monday afternoon. So we'll see after that.

I'm not going to say the offensive coaches voted it down. We'll be back at it. . . . I'm sure it will be back.

That's the first time that ever happened, obviously, and also the first time that a six seed has made it to the conference championship game. So that was quite an accomplishment, and something we're obviously happy to see from a balance of competition.

It's made the (GM) job tougher and more unpopular. Because the easier way to go is to sign the popular veteran that's really a good fit in your marketplace, but not a good fit in your salary-cap management. In my mind you make at least three or four of those decisions on a yearly basis now. You used to have one of those, at most, every two or three years.

There were not many days in recent years when he didn't wear his USC sweatshirt,