At some point, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank knew this day would come.

He alluded to it during Super Bowl week when he talked about an eventual succession plan for quarterback Matt Ryan. Back then, though, he couldn’t have known the end would come as soon as it did.

But less than two months later, Blank is into the post-Ryan era -- one he sounded at least prepared for -- after trading the face of the franchise to the Indianapolis Colts. Between Ryan’s age (37 in May) and the 2022 cap hit of more than $48 million after an already-big contract had been restructured the three previous years, it was time to move on.

“At some point, there is a day of reckoning,” Blank said during a Zoom news conference on Tuesday from the annual NFL meetings in Palm Beach, Florida. “And Matt, we absolutely have love for him completely, both personally as well as professionally. We can never thank him enough for the 14 years he gave Atlanta.”

To start preparing for the future, though, it meant parting with Ryan in order for Atlanta to get its cap situation handled. Ryan will count $40.525 million in dead money against the Falcons’ cap for 2022 -- the highest single dead cap number in NFL history.

And it’s part of more than $62 million accounted for in dead money, meaning cap charges for players no longer on the team. But Atlanta decided to eat as much of it as it could this year so it could count on a healthier budget in 2023.

Part of the reason, Blank said, was their inability to re-sign free agents they wanted to keep -- he specifically mentioned linebacker Foyesade Oluokun, who signed with Jacksonville in March, and linebacker De'Vondre Campbell, who left the Falcons for the Arizona Cardinals on a $6 million contract in 2020, as players they couldn’t keep in part because of their money issues.

Blank, though, sees this as a path to eventually getting back to where his team was for the 2016 season -- playing for a Super Bowl. To do that, though, the Falcons are in a position where they’ll have to rebuild much of their roster.

“I certainly want rings and I want rings now. When I talk about rings, it’s not for me, it’s for Atlanta,” Blank said. “That’s one of the reasons that you have to plan for succession. You have to plan for the future. It’s not always about the next 12 months. It’s about 'Can you transition the organization to the next 15 years and have another version of Matt Ryan, who has been a blessing?'”

One of the options the Falcons looked at as a potential Ryan replacement was Deshaun Watson, who was traded from the Houston Texans to the Cleveland Browns on March 18. The Falcons, including Blank, met with Watson for 75 minutes -- a meeting the Atlanta owner attempted to downplay Tuesday.

Blank said he believed the team did enough investigation on Watson to have a conversation with the quarterback, who has 22 civil cases pending against him in Harris County, Texas, carrying allegations from female massage therapists ranging from inappropriate conduct to sexual assault. Grand juries in two Texas counties -- Harris County, where Houston is located, and Brazoria County, where Pearland, Texas, is located -- declined to press criminal charges against Watson earlier this month.

Blank did not say whether he had read the 22 complaints filed against Watson. He said the franchise had spoken to some attorneys about Watson, but he didn’t know which attorneys. The attorney for the 22 women, Tony Buzbee, told ESPN no team had reached out to him or his clients.

Blank did not go into specifics about to whom the team talked or what they inquired about, but he did say after their preliminary investigation they felt “comfortable enough at that point to be able to have that conversation” with Watson.

“We felt an obligation that we ought to at least have a conversation with him,” Blank said. “We did the right amount of exploring to match an hour-and-15-minute discussion we had with him and his team and where it would have gone from there, I really don’t know.

“These other civil allegations are very serious and I think he’s taking them very serious and what will come from that, I’m not sure. But we certainly would have done even more work had it gotten to the point that we were seriously considering a trade.”

The Falcons were one of four teams known to have spoken with Watson, along with the Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints and Cleveland Browns, where Watson was ultimately traded.

While the Watson pursuit was sorting itself out, the Falcons and Ryan pushed back the deadline for his roster bonus and allowed Ryan to at least start looking into possible places he might want to go in a trade.

Ryan met with Indianapolis’ decision-makers by Zoom on March 19. Two days later, he landed with the Colts. The Falcons then signed quarterback Marcus Mariota, who was the No. 2 overall pick in 2015 and spent the past two seasons as a backup for the Las Vegas Raiders, as their presumptive Week 1 starter for 2022.