The New Orleans Saints addressed a lot of issues in the past season on the defensive side of the ball, but not everyone is convinced they’ll be a better team. Pro Football Network’s Arif Hasan recently projected that the Saints will have a middle of the road defense and regress a bit from last season. Here’s his reasoning:
Adding Bryan Bresee and Isaiah Foskey should help the Saints, who finished 10th in defensive EPA last year. But they lost quite a bit of defensive talent — Marcus Davenport, David Onyemata, Kaden Elliss, and Shy Tuttle are all gone. Not only that, it’s tough to project high-level play for Paulson Adebo and Bradley Roby despite the excellent secondary players they have otherwise. So, the Saints lose a little bit of ground in 2023.
While the Saints lost a lot of bigger-named players, they didn’t lose a ton of players that made largely positive impacts last year. Kaden Elliss was a great player, but would still have been the third linebacker on the roster. The others added almost nothing to the pass rush while also contributing to one of the worst run defenses in the country.
The defense was in large need of a shakeup and added two exciting players in the draft while also bringing in a couple of players in free agency who will likely be lateral moves for the guys that they lost.
Add in more development for Alontae Taylor and Paulson Adebo, while ideally not losing Marshon Lattimore for over half of the season, it’s hard to imagine this defense being worse than last season. The biggest concerns would be the older guys like Cameron Jordan and Demario Davis jumping the shark and regressing, but that was not a worry addressed by Hasan.
