This team is utterly screwed. The New Orleans Saints might be one of the NFL’s biggest flops of the year already as they’ve been floundering in a division that they were predicted to comfortably win just a few months ago.
What a joke this season has been for Saints fans.
Despite spending hundreds of millions in the offseason to bring in star free agent signings, the New Orleans Saints look further away from competing for the NFC South division crown, let alone the NFC title or the Super Bowl, than any time in the past decade. And, being honest, I think this is the final season before a massive New Orleans rebuild if nothing changes.
Okay, I’m not sure how many of you guys watched the Jaguars vs. Saints Thursday Night Football game last night given both starting QBs were questionable to play (they did), it was on Amazon Prime (which does have good video quality when the game doesn’t buffer every 25 seconds), and both teams are rather smaller-market franchises, but it was a struggle early on.
Not only were both sides getting routinely stopped, going 3-and-out, or just making some of the most boneheaded plays of all-time (see all of those punt return flops), but it was a heavily one-sided game. I know it’s unusual for a game that sees both teams play like completely buffoons be one-sided, but the Jaguars somehow managed to take a 24-9 lead a little over midway through the 4th quarter despite not being able to do anything productive on offense.
Well, I say somehow, but it was really down to the Saints being complete morons with the football. Whether it was a muffed punt, Derek Carr throwing the ball up and saying a prayer, failing to convert MULTIPLE 4th down attempts, or dropping WIDE OPEN passes (more on that in a second), the Saints just couldn’t manage a coherent drive. And they were at home!
The only good drive the Saints had that game was the Michael Thomas TD to tie the score 24-24 (yes, the Jaguars were so bad last night that they managed to let a neutered Saints offense score 15 straight points on them in a single quarter) as that was the only time Carr was able to dish the ball out deep to his receivers consistently.
Every other drive either ended in a turnover, punt, a field goal attempt (which one was missed), or a dogged, painful 4th-down conversion. And that’s the issue with this team: they DON’T have an offense despite paying hundreds of millions on offensive weapons.
I know Saints fans will point to the missed field goal and Foster Morreau 3rd down drop in the endzone on the last drive of the game as the reasons why they didn’t win yesterday, but that’s really not true. The reason why they didn’t win was because Derek Carr, who is making $150M over the next four seasons, seemingly can’t lead an offense anymore.
Long gone are the days where Derek Carr was able to throw for over 4k passing yards in four consecutive seasons, throw at least 20 touchdowns, have a completion percentage of 67% or better, and keep his TD-INT ratio under 1.7 as he’s been one of the most inconsistent, inaccurate, and underperforming QBs in the league.
Sure, he has led the Saints to three wins this year (they’re 3-4 right now) and has 1,600 yards, but the combined records of the teams he has beaten is 3-15.
I don’t want to make this a Derek Carr bashing article as guys like Chris Olave (471 receiving yards, 13th in NFL), Michael Thomas (371 receiving yards, 21st in the NFL), Alvin Kamara (he was suspended for the first four games), and the offensive line (20 sacks given up, 6th worst in NFL) haven’t lived up to their contracts for on-field and/or off-field reasons, but the offense generally starts and stops with the QB. And Carr hasn’t been good enough against teams that aren’t complete trash.
Though, just to wrap up this article with perhaps the most disastrous element of the Saints team, I don’t know how head coach Dennis Allen still has a job. Not only has he gone 10-14 as the Saints head coach in two seasons, he’s 18-42 as a head coach overall, and he hasn’t had a winning season once in five years as an NFL head coach, but he’s also the head coach of a Bottom-10 offense with over $600M+ in contract worth tied up in it.
He is a defensive-minded head coach and probably doesn’t have much say in the offensive play call designs, but this failure cannot be overlooked when evaluating his overall job. These are his coordinators, play callers, and his coaching staff after all.
All in all, I think the Saints are just flat out screwed as they’ve not only dropped a game already to their main division challengers in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this season, but they’re already two games back on Tampa with the possibility of it being three games this Sunday.
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