For 15 years, Drew Brees and Sean Payton were one of the NFL’s all-time best quarterback-head coach combinations. Together with the Saints in New Orleans, they won an astonishing 133 games, seven NFC South titles, and brought a fateful Super Bowl title (44) to the franchise.
Even with such an astronomically high standard set by future Hall of Fame quarterback and coach, it’s starting to be hard to imagine the struggling new-look Saints meeting that elite bar of play any time soon.
Thursday night saw the Saints’ latest humiliation — a 42-34 gift to the Cardinals straight out of the hands of a heartbroken Andy Dalton — happen in front of a national audience. And as much of the focus appeared to be on Arizona’s internal strife, I couldn’t help but wonder why we weren’t talking more about a listless New Orleans.
this camera angle is absolute poetry pic.twitter.com/BuDZXLC1eA
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) October 21, 2022
In the first year under new head coach Dennis Allen (taking over for the iconic Payton), the Saints are three games under .500 before Halloween. They have no discernible identity on either side of the ball and were already quite top-heavy with a bunch of noteworthy stars like Marshon Lattimore and Cameron Jordan (and yes, even the young Chris Olave) and not much behind them. Before Thursday night’s laugher even began, New Orleans was 26th in Football Outsiders’ DVOA efficiency metric. After the egg the Saints just laid, that’s likened only to get worse. (In hindsight, it should’ve been quite alarming that this same Saints squad gave the Bryce Young/C.J. Stroud-bound Panthers what might turn out to be one of their only wins of the 2022 season!)
All of this would be fine and dandy — you can eat rebuilding years from time to time in the NFL when you have to — if the Saints had a pending easy path to a franchise quarterback. Because admittedly, that’s probably been their biggest issue since Drew Brees retired after the 2020 season. An injured Jameis Winston has just 10 starts over the last two years since he was anointed as the starting QB. Meanwhile, fill-ins like tight end/running/quarterback/question mark Taysom Hill and Andy Dalton have usually disappointed when asked to step in.
So, at least there’s a bright spot out of a thin team struggling to build consistently positive momentum, right? The Saints, with the current No. 4 overall in the 2023 draft (woo!), are in a great spot to find a signal caller that could potentially start to elevate them like Brees once did, right? Right?
About that.
After some wheeling and dealing before the 2022 draft last April, the Saints, actually, do not own their current golden first-round pick ticket to the 2023 draft. The NFC-leading Eagles do. There’s only one thing worse than being a lousy team in the NFL, and it’s being a lousy team with seemingly zero main thruways back to relevance. At least hapless squads like the Panthers — who, again, beat the Saints this year! — can count on getting a quarterback they believe they can build around in the spring.
New Orleans’ future situation gets bleaker when you consider the leftover remaining salary cap bill they still have to pay down from the Brees-Payton years. After years of kicking the can down the road so they could contend with Brees and Payton, the Saints are currently a projected $54 million (!) over a raised salary cap in 2023. Note: They only have 36 players under contract for 2023. So, something’s gotta give, and by “give,” I mean the Saints might have to make some painful decisions in the coming months.
Theoretically, the Saints could continue pushing the bill forward, ignoring those annoying debt collectors from the NFL threatening a hit to their credit score, but that would be pretty silly when you don’t have a franchise quarterback in place. Typically, you only go “all-in” when you have a team ready to win, and a quarterback that can go places — like the Brees-Payton Saints of old did.
The Saints of the Allen/Winston/Hill/Dalton/Whatever era, definitively, do not.
All of this buries the lede in that I’m not exactly sure who the future building blocks of the future are. Olave is a nice player, sure. Based on early returns, the Offensive Rookie of the Year contender seems like he’s going to ball out for years to come. But the arguable next-best players on the team (Jordan, Demario Davis, Michael Thomas, Tyrann Mathieu, etc.) are already near 30 or well into their 30s.
Seriously. Sans Olave, who are the other promising young pieces? The third-year Cesar Ruiz? Paulson Adebo in the secondary? Maybe? Who can this team count on amidst a pseudo-rebuild? It’s tough to paint a picture of positivity.
Saints:
– 2-5
– No 2023 1st, 2024 2nd
– $54M over a projected $225M 2023 cap with just 36 players under contract
– More or less don’t have a QB
– Two of their best players on Defense will be 34 in 2023Other than that though, roster construction approach is totally sustainable
— Brad Spielberger, Esq. (@PFF_Brad) October 21, 2022
Oof, when laid out on paper — again — the Saints are starting to resemble an organization beginning a tailspin with little means to pull up before they crash into the ground.
Few NFL runs will ever be close to what Drew Brees and Sean Payton accomplished together with the Saints. It was a run of excellence that likely only other respective Hall of Fame-caliber coaches and quarterbacks can match. The Saints should probably start deeply treasuring those fateful years — more than they originally planned to feed their nostalgia reserves.
Because New Orleans is stuck in the NFL’s version of Purgatory, and it doesn’t look like it has a path to leave.
