In order to continue his coaching journey, Arthur Smith had to quit.

He loved the two years he spent with the Washington Football Team as a defensive quality control coach and college scouting assistant under legendary coach Joe Gibbs from 2007-08. While that time cemented his desire to be an NFL head coach, Smith also knew the best thing was to leave.

Not because he felt as though he wouldn’t eventually move up in the organization. He just wanted to do it away from his family’s connections to the Washington Football Team: The organization played its games at FedEx Field, and Smith’s father is Frederick W. Smith, the founder, chairman and CEO of FedEx.

“We all have connections that help you, but with my dad’s involvement up there, and playing in FedEx Field, I just felt like when you’re the quality control, it’s fine,” Smith told ESPN. “You’re at the entry level, and they’re hard jobs to get and I was lucky to be in that, but to legitimately move up I knew I had to get away.

“I just felt after two years I’d kind of run my course in Washington, and I was very aware of that.”

It might have been a hard move to make, but it has paid off by starting him on the path to becoming the 18th head coach in Atlanta Falcons history.

Don’t misunderstand: Smith isn’t estranged from his family or ungrateful for all the advantages that come with being the son of a billionaire. (Fred Smith is worth $5.8 billion, according to Forbes.) It just was important to him to put in the work and be judged on what he accomplished, and not have anyone influenced by anything else.

“That’s the good thing about sports,” Smith said. “They do keep score. There are results, and that kind of gave me a chip on my shoulder to kind of prove it. That’s what I loved about it. But I love my family. ... I always was put off by people whose family or parents had accomplished something and [they] thought they had accomplished something.

“I never thought that I accomplished anything that my dad did or any of my [nine] siblings [did]. They’re all very appreciative of what everybody’s done, but I never thought there was anything special about me because I happened to be born into it.”

Smith had that attitude when he was younger, too. In high school at the prestigious Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, Maryland, Smith didn’t flaunt his family’s wealth. He didn’t have an ounce of entitlement, said Dan Paro, who just completed his 24th season as Georgetown Prep’s head football coach.

“We always tell the young men: Treat people the right way. Be great teammates, and outwork whoever you’re competing [against], and I think that’s who he is,” Paro said. “He loved the grind. He loved the process. He loved the traditions. I think that’s everything. He’s the kid who loved to go to practice. A lot of guys don’t like that.

“I remember sometimes in practice he understood one speed and only one speed. And just trying to get him to understand you can’t maul everyone, we are at practice; you’ve got to protect each other. But that’s who he was.”

Smith's drive helped him land a scholarship to North Carolina as a guard. After redshirting in 2001 he suffered a foot injury early in the 2002 season, missed that season and the next with the injury, and played sparingly in 2004 and 2005. When he graduated, he stayed on as a graduate assistant, which was his first real taste of coaching.

It was an eye opener for Smith. Coach John Bunting was fired in October but was allowed to finish the season. The Tar Heels went 3-9, their fifth consecutive non-winning season under Bunting, and Smith was jobless in December.

“It was a tough year,” Smith said. “You saw probably the worst side of the profession. A lot of things you pay attention to and how people reacted to a lot of that, which is stressful. It’s stressful to a lot of people and their families. You see the good, the bad and the ugly.”

After Smith's two years under Gibbs, he took a job as a defensive analyst with Ole Miss in 2010. But he got back into the NFL the following year as a defensive quality control coach with the Tennessee Titans.

Smith said he loved coaching defense and thought his path to becoming a head coach would have been on that side of the ball. But Smith said then-Titans coach Mike Munchak convinced him otherwise as Smith moved to offensive quality control coach in 2012 before assisting with the offensive line and tight ends in 2013.

“I kind of told him my long-term goals, and he thought it’d be good for me to move back over to offense, which I had played and started out as a GA,” Smith said. “I was involved in both helping the tight ends and the O-line, and I loved the O-line, obviously that’s what I was as my background. But to [eventually] be a coordinator, I thought at least if you’re in the tight end room you can be involved in everything, kind of get your fits with the line and then the passing game.”

Seven years and three head coaches later, Smith became the Titans' offensive coordinator. That’s where he rose to prominence as a head-coaching candidate. He revitalized the careers of quarterback Ryan Tannehill and running back Derrick Henry. He took a castoff quarterback and turned him into the NFL’s second-highest-rated passer and turned Henry loose to become the NFL’s leading rusher in 2019 and 2020.

That was a key thing for Falcons owner Arthur Blank.

“You care about [Smith’s] humility, hard work, leadership, players love him, very creative, produced at a high level at Tennessee and has adopted an offense in Tennessee around their players, around who they have, in this case an outstanding running back and a quarterback who frankly didn't have a great career before he came to Tennessee,” Blank said. “And I think I give Coach Smith a lot of credit for that, along with Ryan Tannehill and same thing with Derrick Henry -- until he was coordinated by Arthur Smith.

“I felt all those factors were really important to us. The fact that he was creative, staying ahead of the times of what's happening in the NFL -- you know, some leaders have the ability to see around corners, and I think it's important, not everybody can do that. ... He's prepared to make adjustments to it based on the players that he has.”

Those are exactly the kinds of things Smith wanted to hear when he made his decision to leave Washington after the 2008 season. Being the son of the founder of FedEx is irrelevant compared to what he’s done as a coach.

In fact, it’s not even a commonly known fact that Smith is related to Frederick W. Smith -- which Smith admits is partly because he has a pretty common last name. It’d be different if it were, say, Bezos.

“At least when you go places, you’re right, it’s not people are recognizing you by your last name,” Smith said. “That certainly helps. I always joke maybe in some ways it lowers expectations because people don’t think like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to do s---. He’s just got to do a decent job.’”

That’s certainly not been the case.