This seemed to be the way the wind was blowing, but it’s appearing increasingly certain that the New Orleans Saints will run it back again with Dennis Allen as their head coach in 2024. Local reporting from NewOrleans.Football’s Nick Underhill and national reports from NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero are in lockstep: barring a complete collapse in the final two weeks of the regular season, Saints leadership is planning for Allen to remain the team’s head coach next season.
While Allen has come up short in both of his first two years as New Orleans’ head coach — mirroring his ugly start with the Raiders a decade ago — the Saints are all too eager to make excuses for him. Last year it was the challenges of an injury-ridden roster and poor quarterback performance.
This season, Rapoport shares that the Saints are giving Allen a mulligan for having had to navigate “a suspension of their best offensive player Alvin Kamara, included a variety of injuries to starting quarterback Derek Carr, and featured countless variations to the offensive line and front-seven looks due to more injuries.”
Now, that doesn’t mean change isn’t on the way; Carr’s struggles to elevate the offense beyond what Andy Dalton and Jameis Winston achieved with it last year have the Saints looking critically at their coaching staff and some veteran players, so more turnover on that side of the ball could be a point of emphasis. But it’s not like they haven’t shuffled the offensive coaching staff already. Allen has replaced the offensive line coach, wide receivers coach, tight ends coach and put quarterbacks coach Ronald Curry in a more prominent position as the passing game coordinator through his first two offseasons. Maybe the third time’s the charm for upgrading offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael.
Either way, Allen will be back, bring his 152nd-best career win percentage with him. It’s very plausible that the Saints viewed the Allen-and-Carr experiment as a two-year process all along. Carr’s heavy contract guarantees run out after the 2024 season, which is the third year of Allen’s contract. If they fail to reach the playoffs again it would be much easier to jettison them both and, maybe, install a new regime with a high draft pick in 2025. But that’s a tough vision to sell to a fanbase that’s been let down by Loomis and his leadership team before. Hopefully the Saints can just get back to winning games and entertaining fans sooner rather than later.
