Expert Analysis
11/8/24
16 min read
Saints' Rebuild Crisis: How New Orleans’ Gamble Finally Caught Up with Them
The New Orleans Saints will have a new look this Sunday when they play the Atlanta Falcons in an NFC South showcase.
Reeling on the heels of a loss to the Carolina Panthers, the Saints will have a new head coach, interim head coach Darren Rizzi, and be down one of their best players, CB Marshon Lattimore — as he was traded to the Washington Commanders for several mid-round draft choices earlier this week.
This is, indeed, what 2-7 feels like.
Those who have covered the league for any notable time have known that the Saints have always been marching to the beat of their own drum with their team-building philosophies. Their contract management has created one of the best annual traditions of the offseason — with cries from fans of the salary cap being fake or not real as the Saints find ways to continue to throw big money to talent or wipe away tens of millions of dollars of cap debt with restructures.
The question was not whether or not the Saints’ uniquely resilient commitment to creatively circumventing the salary cap would work but rather how many years they could do it before it caught up with them.
It seems we know our answer. This Saints team? They’re deep in the muck. Their Week 9 loss to the Panthers was their first one-score game since Week 4. The team had lost by an average of nearly 20 points per game across their four prior contests.
They’re injured in key spots, but they were lacking in depth before the season and are now charged with building positive momentum with an interim head coach. This will be an uphill climb. And the process of righting the ship this offseason feels even more enormous in large part due to the team's inflexibility and how that could, in theory, impact their head coaching search.
How did the Saints get there? How did a franchise that went through two full lifecycles with the head coach and quarterback combination of Sean Payton and Drew Brees get so far off the rails? There’s no shortage of parties at fault.
The Guilty Parties
Let’s start with the obvious. All good things must come to an end. That is true in both football and life.
For the Saints, “good things” could be quantified as Brees' and Payton's career. Both rode off into the sunset around the same time — Brees after a 2020 season in which he played in 12 games while getting by almost exclusively on his savvy anticipation and accuracy in the quick game. It was time.
Brees played until he was 41 and was clearly running out of gas with his arm. So off he rode into the sunset, unceremoniously after a three-interception performance in the divisional round against the eventual Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Payton lasted one more year, going 9-8 in 2021 and missing the playoffs before hanging up the headset. To be fair to Payton, he was clear about his intentions from the start.
“Retirement is not the right word,” he explained during his press conference announcing the decision.
Payton is no fool and is a brilliant coach. He likely saw the writing on the wall for the Saints organization and where the team was heading going into 2022. And for a coach looking to bolster a potential Hall of Fame resume, staying committed to the Saints direction longer than he did likely fails to help build his case.
Payton has a 165-102 coaching record, putting him 20th all-time in wins and 22nd all-time with a .618 win percentage. He’s managed to scratch out a 13-13 record thus far during his tenure with the Broncos, but more importantly, he’s been given a lot of creative feedback on what the roster looks like.
That might not have been the case in New Orleans because of some of the other guilty parties in the current state of affairs. The retirement of a Hall of Fame quarterback and the departure of a potential Hall of Fame coach within 12 months of each other will undoubtedly create a ripple effect for several seasons afterward. It’s a piece of the puzzle of why the Saints are where they are now.
But that’s just skimming the surface of the Saints’ problems.
Saints Executive Vice President and General Manager Mickey Loomis is the next key figure. Loomis joined the Saints organization in 2000 as the director of football administration and quickly ascended the throne as the team’s general manager by 2002. It was a surprise promotion, as Loomis’s background was in finance, and the team had abruptly fired his predecessor, Randy Mueller, after just two years on the job. Still, Loomis had earned the trust of owner Tom Benson — a seemingly impressive achievement in its own right.
"Mickey has many years of experience in both the football and business end of football operations, and he will be a tremendous asset as we move forward," Benson said upon hiring Loomis.
One thing Loomis didn’t have? Experience in player evaluation. It made no difference, as the team would make the right hires elsewhere to jumpstart the operation and allow Loomis to learn on the fly. The team would flirt with contention early on until a breakthrough in 2006.
First-year head coach Sean Payton and their new free agent signing at quarterback, Drew Brees, had clicked. The team advanced to the divisional round of the playoffs in 2006, Brees led the league in passing yards, and the rest, they say, is history.
However, the inevitability of Loomis’ tenure with the Saints includes several cycles through the NFL roster-building experience. Players come, and players go. Retirements, regressions, and resets are all a part of the game. You need to build trust with the person signing your checks to ensure you have the opportunity to see each reset through to completion before starting a new one. And if there’s one thing Mickey Loomis had, it was Tom Benson's trust.
Benson sadly passed away in March 2018 at the age of 90. His wife, Gayle, assumed his role as the principal owner of the Saints and the city’s NBA franchise, the Pelicans. Gayle had married Benson in 2004, so she’d been alongside Tom for nearly the entirety of Loomis’ tenure as general manager.
She’d experienced the Payton and Brees story firsthand and was present for several of the Loomis resets within that time frame, including the most prominent recalibration from 2014 to 2016.
The Saints went 7-9 in each of those three seasons after an 11-5 campaign in 2013. The 2017 season saw the Saints leap back up to 11-5 and then win 13, 13, and 12 games in the three seasons that followed.
Hardship and resets are not a foreign concept to Gayle Benson and Mickey Loomis.
However, the success of that reset from 2014 to 2016 was spurred on by a few factors that are working against the Saints. First and foremost, the team had a stable coaching staff and quarterback throughout.
Yes, Payton was suspended for the 2012 season due to Bountygate. Still, he and Brees had both been with the team for nearly a decade at that point. Everyone knew the expectations of how the team wanted to look and feel on the field. Also, the team absolutely crushed a number of their draft classes throughout this period.
In 2013, the Saints drafted safety Kenny Vaccaro, OT Terron Armstead, and IDL John Jenkins in the top 100 picks. They would also add WR Kenny Stills in the fifth round. Modest draft classes in 2014 and 2015 brought some notable talent, like WR Brandin Cooks and OL Andrus Peat, but the success rate was nowhere close to 2013.
However, the 2016 and 2017 draft classes reset the entire roster.
Somehow, the Saints; next draft class was even better:
This incredible run of draft choices ignited the Saints to 52 wins in four seasons (including the playoffs) and within a controversial non-call in the NFC Championship Game away from a trip to the Super Bowl in the 2018-19 NFC Championship Game.
The conductor behind the scenes? Loomis.
Loomis likely feels he can swing his way out of any mess, including the one the Saints sit in now. He’s been a wheeler and dealer in the NFL Draft for years.
He has made 26 draft day trades since 2008, and all of them have been up the board. The team’s draft strategy is simple: go get your guys. Sometimes, like with Ryan Ramczyk, the team will send player talent away as well.
That trade featured WR Brandin Cooks heading out for the Patriots’ first-round pick. The track record of successful business dealings helps Loomis’ case. But the big questions that linger are different without Payton and Brees serving as the cornerstones of the direction of the franchise.
Which brings us back to today.
The Bill Comes Due
New Orleans’ pathway to success has run through stability in the four key elements of the football team:
- Ownership
- Management
- Coaching
- Quarterback
Father Time has shaken this team’s foundation to the core. Gayle Benson has served as the owner of the team since March 2018, but this is the first time the team is in truly troubled waters under her direction. Mickey Loomis has the trust of ownership, but the deterioration of the elements below him in the chain of command has soiled his stubborn persistence that the team needs to push further and deeper with its current core of talent to try to contend.
There is no answer at head coach after Gayle Benson’s decision to dismiss Dennis Allen. And while the team is, thanks to their salary cap situation, tethered to Derek Carr for the foreseeable future, he feels more like an anchor than a life preserver.
The Saints could have opted to reset their roster the moment Payton walked away. Instead, as the team entrusted Dennis Allen with the head coaching job, they doubled down again and again on the current roster. Aging players continued to get lump sum cash payments to restructure their cash flow and optimize the salary cap on an annual basis.
This has been done time and time again, further deferring cash-paid commitments into future years. It’s been like this tirelessly. It has been done with top-end talent and middle-tier talent alike. Hell, the team just did it with Alvin Kamara in the past several weeks.
Kamara, in his age-29 season, received a two-year, $24.5 million extension to save $18 million in cap space. The Saints could have traded or cut Kamara in the offseason as a running back turning 30 before the start of the 2025 season and saved nearly that entire amount against the cap anyway but chose to offer more years and new money to Kamara instead.
As this process unfolds, good players on expiring contracts have been allowed to walk away in free agency—in large part because the Saints have lacked flexibility with their cap space as they’ve been reshuffling the deck chairs already in-house. This includes 2017 draft class stars Marcus Williams and Trey Hendrickson, both of whom have gone on to find stardom in Baltimore and Cincinnati, respectively.
The Lattimore trade is a breath of fresh air, as the Saints will fast-track $31 million in dead cap in 2025 and clear their books for 2026 and beyond from his commitments. Loomis is still, as of this point, running point, and based on the tone of his messaging this week regarding Allen’s dismissal, it isn’t clear that Loomis is particularly keen on any major upheavals in the team’s process.
He essentially blamed the team’s injuries on the record and, by extension, Allen’s dismissal.
"Dennis Allen, I think, is a fantastic football coach, and I think anybody in our league who would talk about him thinks he's a fantastic football coach….he is. I think, in this case, the circumstances created the record. That's just the truth, and a lot of people don't want to hear it,” Loomis said.
"But it just gets back to what stares at you right in the face: we've had an abnormal number of injuries, including those to our quarterback, and we haven't been able to overcome that. And so, that puts pressure and stress on the organization, and ultimately, it causes a change."
Allen has been suspiciously absent from this briefing of the Saints’ situation. That isn’t just because he’s already been dismissed. It’s because he’s honestly the least culpable in the team’s state of affairs. He was handed a rebuilding situation and asked to win with it in 2022 when Payton walked away.
Allen’s debut season as the Saints head coach in 2022 came with the second-oldest and fifth-most expensive roster in the NFL. The Saints’ cash spend that year — $275 million — was equally close to the No. 1 and No. 6 spots.
Cash spending dipped from fifth to 10th in 2023, but the team’s average age still exceeded 27, keeping them in the top three in the NFL. Cash spending dipped again this season, all the way down to No. 26, and the roster still ranks in the top 10 in average age.
This gradual dropoff in cash spending is due in part to the rigidity of the team’s salary cap situation. The Saints’ 2025 cap liabilities are pushing nearly $340 million.
None of this absolves Allen for his shortcomings as a coach. He wasn’t a perfect hire. Still, he was handed an unrealistically ambitious expectation relative to the age of the roster, the cost of the talent, and the lack of exit ramps off of their current contracts.
According to Jason Fitzgerald of Over The Cap, the Saints have just two players on the roster who, if cut, would save more than $3 million in 2025 cap liabilities.
The entire thesis of the Saints’ handling of life post-Payton was committed to keeping the team’s culture intact without identifying pieces of the culture. Clinging to the remainder of the former is sinking the Saints' annual outlook to the depths we currently find the team and probably beyond in 2025.
The Path Forward
Where do the Saints go from here? How does this get fixed?
The restructuring of all the top contracts on the roster will continue, locking said talent in for another season and further deferring cap debts to future years. Currently, this is the Saints’ only way to compliance.
The issue with this is that it includes players like Cam Jordan and Demario Davis, both of whom will be playing in their age 36 seasons in 2025. It also likely includes OT Ryan Ramczyk, assuming he isn’t forced into retirement from the back injury keeping him out of action this season.
It includes multi-tool weapon Taysom Hill, who fought an injury earlier this season in his age-34 season. He turns 35 next August. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the Derek Carr contract, which Loomis and company ambitiously offered in the middle of this restructuring cycle ahead of the 2023 season. Carr signed for four years, $150 million, and was restructured out of necessity ahead of the season for cap compliance.
The Saints will need to trade him, restructure him, or renegotiate his $30 million base salary for additional relief. He’s owed a $10 million roster bonus on the fifth day of the 2025 league calendar year.
Throughout all of this muck, the Saints will be hiring a head coach. Perhaps interim coach Darren Rizzi does a good enough job to warrant consideration for a permanent job title. It would likely be the best-case scenario for the Saints, as they will be pitching themselves to coaching candidates more so than the other way around.
But no matter who the team hires to coach the roster in 2025, it won’t serve as the ultimate fix for what ails the Saints. That must come from one of two developments:
- Gayle Benson must decide that she has seen enough and dismiss the only executive and general manager she has ever known in 20 years around the franchise
- Mickey Loomis himself must have a foundational awakening as an executive
The former is easier said than done. Gayle Benson does not have a successor in place for the ownership of the franchise. Instead, it is her intent to have the team sold to an owner who is contractually bound to keep the Saints in New Orleans — the proceeds of that sale are to then be donated to charities across the city of New Orleans.
It is a wonderful final gift to the city when the time comes. However, with no family involved to help execute her will for the team, the responsibilities are arranged to be handled by the higher-ups in the organization. Team president Dennis Lauscha is the first in line to ensure Benson’s estate is executed according to her wishes. The second in line?
You guessed it. Mickey Loomis.
Would Benson dismiss Loomis from his post when he is so interwoven in the organization's operations? That remains to be seen. Perhaps it is as easy as whoever holds the Executive Vice President title being second in line for executing Benson’s estate. Perhaps it is not. It certainly creates another complicating layer to separating Loomis, the football executive, from Loomis, the long-time Saints central figure.
If Loomis remains in his post and the Saints turn this ship around, he will need to understand one thing: the culture of the Sean Payton New Orleans Saints is gone, and the time to stop clinging to its remnants is now.
This franchise needs a drastic new strategy for its roster management and contract structure. It should start taking heavy losses upfront to achieve long-term gains. It also needs a new philosophy for its draft assets.
Drafting by volume, not trading picks for moving up, and drafting fewer, more targeted talents is a necessary key to flooding this roster with cost-controlled talent to help recalibrate the roster's balance and cap liabilities.
It needs to finally embrace moving backward in order to move forward.
