It looks like Saints fans should expect more of the same come 2024. New Orleans Saints executive vice president and general manager Mickey Loomis held his annual end-of-season press conference Wednesday. Despite firing longtime offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael on Tuesday, Loomis remained steadfast in his decision to not complete the transition by firing head coach Dennis Allen.
When asked about the decision to bring back Allen, Loomis reached for a sheet of paper in his back pocket while saying the “lazy thing to do” is to assign blame to coaches and quarterbacks based on “the result of the season.” He went on to list how some of the league’s best coaches of all time began their careers.
“Look, I was prepared for this question,” Loomis said, referring to the folded-up paper. “Chuck Noll, his first three years. Hall of Fame coach. He was 1-13, 5-9, 6-8. But they recognized that this guy’s a good football coach, right? Bill Belichick. Here’s his first three seasons. 6-10, 7-9, 7-9. Tom Landry. 0-11, 4-9, 5-8, 4-10, 5-8. Hall of Fame coaches, all of them. Bill Walsh, first year 2-14. Second year 6-10.
“I think the easy thing to do is just look at the results,” Loomis continued, “and say ‘Oh, no. We gotta have a change.’ You gotta look beyond that. What are the reasons why we were 9-8 instead of 13-4. It’s collective. It’s the players, it’s the coaches, it’s me, it’s our personnel staff, our roster. It’s variables, sometimes we don’t have any control of.”
At 24-26, Allen currently has the lowest win percentage of any active head coach in the league at 34.3%. His runway is longer than all the coaches Loomis listed outside of Landry, a coach credited with inventing the 4-3 defense and “Flex Defense,” a defense so effective that he had to also invent an offensive counter to it.
The thing is, Loomis’ mindset of staying the path no matter the result is what the Saints have done for the entirety of the post-Brees-Payton era. Before Allen became the head coach of the Saints in 2022, he was the Saints’ defensive coordinator for seven seasons. Before that, Allen spent six combined seasons between 2006 and 2015 in various positional/assistant roles. The same goes for Carmichael, the recently-fired offensive coordinator who had held the position since 2009.
Has having the same faces in the building led to success for New Orleans? Depends how you define “success.” Allen was a great defensive coordinator. New Orleans finished in the top-10 in defensive DVOA five straight seasons before his promotion to head coach. That has slipped of late, though, with the Saints finishing ninth and 15th, respectively, in Allen’s two seasons as head coach. Carmichael’s falloff was even harder. The Saints finished top-10 in offensive DVOA every single year between 2009 and 2020, before cratering to 26th the year after Drew Brees retired. In the two years since Payton left the organization, Carmichael’s offense finished 22nd and 17th.
It’s part of a larger thesis for the post-Brees-Payton era. Loomis and the Saints ownership continue to run back the same corps despite not seeing results. Loomis has continued to work cap magic on the Saints, deferring massive money and taking on dead cap hits to keep big-name veteran contracts. New Orleans has yet to take a legitimate swing at a rookie quarterback, continuing to work with veteran retreads. They keep handing out huge deals to veteran talents and longtime Saints. It’s all half-measures to hold together a team that’s made one conference championship since winning the Super Bowl in 2009.
Whatever relative success New Orleans had under Brees and Payton has all but dissipated. The Saints are 16-18 under Allen in two seasons, finishing 9-8 this year despite having one of the easiest schedules in football and playing in the league’s weakest division. They also finished 2023 as the oldest roster in the league, nearly half-a-year older than second place. The Saints have not made the playoffs since Brees retired and six different quarterbacks have started games in the last three seasons. At the start of the next league year in March, the Saints will be $82.2 million over the cap – nearly double the second-worst team.
Even worse, Saints fans can expect more of this in the future. Loomis reiterated the slow-play mantra when it came time to ask about finding a new offensive coordinator.
“Look, one of the mistakes that our league, in general makes, is we’re in a rush, in a race to hire people because we’re afraid of someone else beating us to the draw,” Loomis said. “I think that’s a mistake. I think the most important thing is the right guy in the right situation. Take your time. Make sure it’s a thoughtful, planned decision. We’re gonna go through the process and make the right hire. We’re not gonna make the expedient hire.”
A team that probably should have blown it up last year and definitely should be blowing it up this year is running it back one more time.
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