Dennis Allen set out in January to reimagine the New Orleans Saints’ offensive foundation for the first time in a generation. And where the team’s head coach landed, after a full-on coordinator search, was on a plan to take the whole thing down to the studs.
There was logic to it.
Sean Payton, the greatest coach in franchise history, arrived in Louisiana in 2006. He spent 16 seasons building and running a historically great system. In ’09, Pete Carmichael Jr. was promoted to become his top offensive lieutenant, and coordinator, after Doug Marrone left for the top job at Syracuse. Carmichael stayed in the role for 15 years, becoming the play-caller in ’22 when Payton left and Allen was promoted to replace him.
No one’s arguing about what that scheme did. But coming out of two playoff-less seasons, Allen felt a need to turn the page. One issue, definitively, was how complex the offense had become. There was no limit to the volume that Payton, Carmichael and Drew Brees could handle, so for years and years and years—and as offensive football became simpler, faster and easier on players elsewhere—the Saints’ playbook got heavier and more tangled up.
What worked for Brees & Co. for all those years didn’t work the same for younger guys.
Simply put, Allen wanted someone who could untangle the Saints’ offense.
Safe to say, two games into 2024, he found him.
On Sunday, the Dallas Cowboys didn’t stand a chance. It was 35–16 at halftime. New Orleans scored touchdowns on all six of its possessions in the first three quarters, didn’t punt until there was 9:43 left in the game and didn’t have a single three-and-out in its 44–19 win. This was on the heels of a 47–10 opening-day rout of the Carolina Panthers that, evidently, was about more than just the opponent.
At the controls of it all, Klint Kubiak—the 37-year-old son of Gary Kubiak whom Allen picked to simplify and jet-power the offense—was empowering his guys to play faster and freer with less on their minds. And the interesting thing is that perhaps no one is benefitting more than the one player who could handle the volume of the old system. Derek Carr, at 33, is balling and the Saints are rolling.
“He’s in a great spot,” Allen told me an hour after the game. “He’s really comfortable with what he’s being asked to do. He knows he doesn’t have to do everything. There’s been so many times in his career where it’s all been on his shoulders, how he plays, getting everybody in the right play call, the right checks, the right protections, the right everything. We’ve put a little bit more of the pressure on us as coaches to put the proper game plan together and free him up to play the game.
“I think you see when he’s protected and he’s got clean pockets to throw from, he’s pretty f---ing good.”
You could say that about a lot of the Saints right now.
Fifteen games down, and Week 2’s almost wrapped up. Here’s what we have over in the takeaways …
• The Patrick Mahomes Chiefs have become the Tom Brady Patriots.
• Matt LaFleur should, at some point, get some credit for what’s happening in Green Bay.
• Am I the only one who sees what Geno Smith is doing in Seattle?
But we’re starting with New Orleans’s wild start.
The term that some of the players who came up in the system Mike Shanahan and Gary Kubiak built in Denver three decades ago is “the illusion of complexity.” The idea of it is to make things easier on players so they can play fast, while coaches shoulder the burden of making it hard on a defense. It’s accomplished through formationing, motioning and misdirection, and all the tiny details that make one play—on its face—look identical to the next three plays, even though the ball might be going to four different guys over that stretch.
Given the task Allen undertook in moving on from Carmichael after the 2023 season, that was one thing that made Kubiak attractive. But it wasn’t the only thing.
The Saints’ coach also liked the scars Kubiak carried. He’d twice been a part of fired staffs—in 2021 with Mike Zimmer in Minnesota, and ’22 with Nathaniel Hackett in Denver—before latching on with Kyle Shanahan’s Super Bowl express in ’23. He’d seen his first play-calling opportunity, with the Vikings, die as a result. He’d had a chance to go back and look at what he did right and wrong and, Allen thought, would be able to hit the ground running.
“I knew that he was smart,” Allen says. “I knew that he had a championship pedigree. He had done it before. That was part of what I was looking for. The thing that kind of separated him a little bit was he’s done it, and so he’s been through that fire. He’s experienced some success with it. He’s experienced some failures with it. I think that’s huge for a young guy, to learn what works, what doesn’t work. Being with Kyle Shanahan for a year, I think Kyle is one of the better play-callers in our league. It’s a combination of a lot of things.”
Another was that, in looking for an offense that would be balanced, and complement his veteran defense, Kubiak’s deep roots in the coaching industry allowed him to bring an experienced staff with him that could build a very complete system.
Among his first hires was 66-year-old Rick “Rico” Dennison, one of the OGs of the Shanahan scheme, who was in Denver for Mike Shanahan’s entire 14-year run in Denver.
He also hired offensive line coach John Benton, who has coached the position in the NFL for more than 20 years, and was line coach on Gary Kubiak’s staffs in Houston, and quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko, who cut his teeth with the Kubiaks in Minnesota from 2019 to ’21.
“Those were guys that I felt were good football coaches,” Allen says. “That system has been successful. I felt like with Rico being able to mastermind the run game and then a couple of the guys figuring out how we want to execute the passing game, I just felt like there was a familiarity and a cohesion that was readymade on the staff. That’s one of the things that is the hardest thing to get is the staff cohesion where everybody sees everything the same way.
“We were able to start that way.”
So when those guys arrived in February, after Kubiak finished up coaching the Super Bowl, they weren’t just hitting the ground running—they were already flying.
The goal, of course, was to get the players moving just as fast.
Carr, to his credit, saw right away what this was doing for his teammates.
After the Week 1 smackdown of the Panthers, it was obvious to him what the new system was doing for teammates such as Chris Olave, Alvin Kamara and Rashid Shaheed, all of whom, at a baseline, could fly as athletes.
“I’m not a 4.2 guy but we have a couple of those, and it allows them to play fast mentally,” Carr told me after the win over the Panthers. “It also gives me opportunities to get on the edge of the defense and make things happen with my legs, getting yards that way. It allows us to play fast and use our athleticism and all those things. It’s a lot of fun.”
And if it looks like Carr’s unshackled, well, that’d be a good observation to make, too.
He’s “only” thrown for 443 yards through two weeks. But he’s been deadly efficient. Against the Panthers, he was 19-of-23 for 200 yards, three touchdowns and a 83.1 QBR. In the first half in Dallas, Carr had a perfect passer rating (158.3), finishing 11-of-16 for 243 yards, two touchdowns, a pick and a 99.4 QBR.
In both games, he had big-shot touchdowns in the first quarter to Shaheed (59 yards against Carolina, 70 yards against Dallas), which fueled big leads, and then leaned on a run game that rumbled for 180 yards against the Panthers and 190 on the Cowboys.
For Allen, it’s been personally gratifying seeing what the offense is doing for Carr, whom he had as a rookie in Oakland in 2014 before reuniting last year.
“It comes back to our ability to run the ball,” Allen says. “If you want to load the box to prevent us from running it, then we’ve got some speed on the outside that can run by you. If you want to play us a split-safety defense, we’re comfortable saying, We’re going to run the fricken ball. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to win. It’s not about how many yards we go for. It’s not about how many points we score. It’s not about yards we run for, yards we throw for, any of that statistically.
“It’s about winning, and that we play a good, complementary game.”
Accordingly, in the opener, with the Panthers geared up to slow down Olave, Carr spread his 19 completions around to eight different receivers. This week, with Dallas playing more balanced, that flipped, and the quarterback leaned heavier on Olave (four catches, 81 yards) and Shaheed (four catches, 96 yards).
They key is to have answers. Which, thus far, Kubiak and his offensive staff have had for their quarterback.
There were a couple big ones Sunday, too, that might’ve gotten a little lost in the fireworks.
My first question for Allen, when we talked Sunday night, was pretty simple.
Did you see this coming?
“I said the same thing last week—I saw our team playing well, I saw our team being competitive and having an opportunity to win. I never saw the score being that score,” he says. “I know we got a good team. I know that we play complementary football. Our feeling going into this game was that we can’t go in saying we’re going to be a drop-back passing team and let them get their pass rush going.
“To do that, we can’t give up touchdowns on defense so that we don’t get in one of these playing catch-up modes. That’s to their advantage. I knew we needed to be able to run the football. The unsung hero of this whole deal was the offensive line who everybody seemed to have question marks coming in. I think they’re playing extremely well.”
Coming into the year, that position group, the bedrock of so many great Saints offenses over the years, was a question mark.
They knew they had their center in Erik McCoy. They knew they had a rock-solid guard in former first-rounder Cesar Ruiz. They didn’t know a whole lot else, and so, back in the spring, the idea of having to deal with Micah Parsons and the Cowboys’ pass rush would’ve been a real nightmare.
Which is where the talent development part of the equation came in. The Saints could feel good about where they were at the skill spots, and at quarterback. The new coaches’ challenge would be—behind Benton and Dennison—fixing the offensive line and, in particular, the tackle spot. So they drafted Taliese Fuaga in the first round to play left tackle, even though he’d been a right tackle at Oregon State, and worked to get 2022 first-rounder Trevor Penning his confidence back, as he transitioned from left tackle to the right side.
On Sunday, the Cowboys registered just one sack, from Chauncey Golston, and that sack, per the stat sheet, was the only quarterback hit Dallas had all afternoon. Of course, that the Saints only had 17 called throws was a part of it. But just having the ability to play that way is a credit to the line. And Fuaga, for what it’s worth, did the job on Parsons when called upon, which is pretty impressive for a guy making his second NFL start.
“I see a guy that doesn’t get flustered, doesn’t let too much bother him,” Allen says. “He’s very mature for being a rookie. He’s a guy that, hell, he hardly didn’t even practice this week. He prepared. He knew the game plan. I thought overall he executed pretty good. I think Trevor Penning, for everybody wanting to write him off, I think he’s done a solid job over on the right side. There’s a good front that we faced.”
And controlling that front enabled everything else on offense, where, over and over again, it looked like the Saints could do just about whatever they wanted.
The first drive covered 70 yards in eight plays, with a 39-yard dig to Olave the headliner. Then came the 70-yarder to Shaheed and, after that, a 57-yard touchdown on a screen to Kamara. Conversely, the fourth touchdown, a 12-yard touchdown run from Kamara, capped a grinding 11-play, 70-yard drive, and the fifth was scored off a turnover.
And that turnover, a pick from Paulson Adebo, was a great sign for a proud defense. Allen was the secondary coach for the 2009 Super Bowl Saints, so he’s seen it before—where an overwhelming offense can energize a defense. Which, really, is the last piece to this puzzle.
“Over the last few years, this team has been waiting for that hope that, Hey, the offense is going to come around,” Allen says. “It’s exciting for everybody that we’ve been able to execute it at such a high level. Here’s the big thing—in the last two games, we’ve won the time of possession. When you’re able to win the time of possession and keep your defense off the field? And not just win the time of possession, but you’re able to score doing that?
“Now, teams are trying to catch up on us. Everybody’s gotten a little shot of energy from what we’ve been able to do offensively. Yet we’re only two weeks in.”
So here’s what’s ahead—a home game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, a division game in Atlanta, a trip to Arrowhead to face the Kansas City Chiefs and then a home game against the reigning NFC South champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Dallas was a challenge, and things won’t get easier.
As such, in a month, the Saints should have a good idea of who they are.
“It’s the National Football League,” Allen says. “If you aspire to be anything, you’re going to have to win these types of games. We were excited about this opportunity. We were looking forward to it. We’re excited about getting Philly coming into our building—it’ll be a great atmosphere, really good team, be another tough competition, tough test for us. We’ll see how we grade out.”
For now, we can say the Saints look, well, like the Saints again.
"The biggest thing is the team is playing the game that we need to play to win the game. That’s got to be our hallmark.” Dennis Allen
It’s packaged differently, of course. But the risk Allen took in detaching from an offensive system that’ll forever hold a special place in New Orleans seems to be paying off. And to the naked eye, it sure has the appearance that Payton’s best teams did—of one that can beat you any which way and make an opponent feel like it’s trying to fight a tidal wave with a surfboard.
"The biggest thing is the team is playing the game that we need to play to win the game,” Allen says. “That’s got to be our hallmark. Our brand of football has to be a tough, physical brand of football. Run the ball. Stop the run. Take our play-action shots. They’re believing in the type of team that we are. The more you have success doing that, when you preach that that’s the message, that’s the type of team we’re going to be. That’s what we’re going to do.
“Then you go out and you do it and you see the results from doing it, and people believe in it more. They get more excited about it. They start realizing this is who we are. This is how we’re going to win. We can be highly successful doing this. Our team is establishing an identity.”
And that identity has indeed been pretty good.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Derek Carr Benefiting Most From Reimagined Saints Offense.
