Super Bowl week hasn’t started off how the New Orleans Saints expected. Hours after team owner Gayle Benson stepped into a spotlight at the historic St. Louis Cathedral to kick off festivities, new reporting from multiple major news outlets revealed the contents of hundreds of emails sent between the team’s chief PR man and the New Orleans archdiocese. It’s a crisis of poor leadership on Airline Drive.
The Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas and WWL TV’s David Hammer, the Associated Press’ Jim Mustian and Brett Martel, plus Jenny Vrentas at the New York Times each shared enlightening information to the “crisis communications” that Saints vice president of communications Greg Bensel volunteered for. With Benson’s blessing, he spent months advising archbishop Gregory Aymond on how to release information, interact with the media, and work on damage control in messages to the community.
It’s a big mess the Saints made for themselves, and now the Saints are asking a new head coach to step into the middle of it. As fate would have it, that coach appears to be Kellen Moore. The Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator has a busy week ahead preparing his team for their Super Bowl LIX matchup with the Kansas City Chiefs. He’ll have multiple media availabilities this week and, as the nominal home team, his Eagles squad will be using the Saints’ team headquarters in Metairie as their daily practice facility.
You can expect Moore is going to be asked about this scandal even though he hasn’t signed anything or been officially hired by the Saints. As one of the faces of an organization the head coach has to answer for a lot of things that don’t have to do with football. With the entire football media world converging on New Orleans before the biggest game of the year, Moore is about to get a taste of that. And he could find it doesn’t agree with him.
Don’t be shocked if Moore decides this is too much. The Saints are already asking a lot of him (or any other coach candidate) with a talent-poor roster, a messy salary cap accounting sheet, and the NFL’s longest-tenured general manager stubbornly clinging to power. Take all that and add a very public connection to a child sex abuse scandal? Many people would decide they’re better off not associating themselves with that.
For what it’s worth, Moore does not keep the Catholic faith like many of the people involved in this crisis (Benson and Bensel both are). He’s reportedly a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When the Saints were left as the last team searching for a head coach in 2025, we wrote that all they had to do was stay out of their own way to get their guy. They couldn’t do that. The state of the roster and organizational disfunction convinced Joe Brady and Kliff Kingsbury to stay with their playoff teams. Moore may have been willing to overlook that, but will he be as eager to sidestep this very real, non-football controversy? That remains to be seen. And if the Saints miss out on their top candidate (again), they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
