If you want to get better from one year to the next in the NFL, having a good offseason is essential. You have to decide if you want to maintain what you have, go all-in chasing upgrades, or blow it up and start over. For the New Orleans Saints, they chose to do what they have been doing for years and swung hard at a bid for the playoffs.
And ESPN’s Bill Barnwell disagreed with that decision. When Barnwell ranked the offseasons of every team, he listed the Saints all the way down at No. 29 out of the 32 teams. Barnwell criticized the decision to go for it all without Drew Brees quarterback. He also doesn’t believe the trades to get first-rounders Chris Olave and Trevor Penning were worth it, stating that they have to be superstars to be good moves:
“It was one thing when the Saints were addicted to all-in tactics in the final days of Drew Brees’ career, but they’re still doing it with Winston as their quarterback. The Saints paid a significant haul to the Eagles to pick up an additional first-rounder in 2022, with the perennially cap-strapped Saints without their first-round pick in 2023. They moved up again on draft day to select wide receiver Chris Olave. The Saints built their legendary 2017 draft class by adding extra picks in the first and third rounds; they’ve been trading away draft capital ever since.
The Saints traded into this draft and dealt up, but if anything, the Saints should have traded down. The organization needed a left tackle after their dalliance with Deshaun Watson put the team’s cap situation on hold and helped send Armstead to Miami, but guys like Duane Brown and Eric Fisher are still available in free agency. Olave and Penning need to be superstars to justify those trades, and as we saw with the Marcus Davenport deal, trading first-rounders to move up doesn’t guarantee stardom.”
From a year-to-year standpoint, I believe that the Saints’ roster has improved from 2021 to 2022. Going from Marcus Williams and Malcolm Jenkins to Tyrann Mathieu and Marcus Maye should at worst be a neutral trade-off, but it could even be an improvement. Terron Armstead to Penning is a negative of course, but the offense should be much better because of the incredible improvement of talent at wide receiver the Saints saw this offseason.
Jameis Winston does have to continue the improvements New Orleans saw last year to make their moves make sense, as they don’t have their 2023 first anymore. Tanking is off the board. Overall, I’d say that the Saints had a very neutral off-season. They should be somewhere closer to the middle of this list.
Across the rest of the NFC South the Atlanta Falcons were the lowest ranked team in the division, coming in at 31st overall. The Carolina Panthers offseason was ranked at 18th and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers haven’t been placed yet as Barnwell has only given grades for the bottom half of the NFL. They await their placement in the top half on Wednesday, June 1. We’ll just have to wait and see if Barnwell’s worrying about the Saints’ moves has any merit in the fall.
