Somewhere between the two pick-sixes Andy Dalton tossed Thursday night, was anyone else double-checking the Saints’ draft capital for 2023, only to remember their (probably quite high) first-round pick is going to the undefeated Eagles?
New Orleans, now 2–5 after Thursday’s 42–34 loss to the Cardinals, captivated us this offseason with the idea of pretending the loss of Sean Payton was not a funeral of sorts. They handed the head coaching gig to Dennis Allen, their overqualified defensive coordinator. They traded up into the first round in a draft that every other team was bailing out of like the automotive stock market during the chip shortage. Naysayers (myself included) were charmed by the idea that Jameis Winston’s promising start to the 2021 season could be sustained, that Chris Olave could have a Ja’Marr Chase–like impact on the offense, the defense would stay a top-five unit and that, sooner or later, Tom Brady would leave the NFC South. So, it made sense to stock up now. At that moment, it made all the sense in the world, and, really, who was going to fault a mostly veteran team for refusing just to tread water?
The problem: What would happen if the post-Payton plan didn’t work out? And, seven weeks into the experiment, it very much looks like it’s not going to work out. In fairness to the Saints, one of Dalton’s wrong-way touchdowns was incidental, a kind of fluky tipped ball gifted to all teams now and then. In a global sense, their team has been absolutely decimated by injury with Thursday’s inactives looking a bit like a Pro Bowl roster. We haven’t even seen Trevor Penning, their other first-round pick in 2022, due to injury, and when Olave manages to get his hands on the ball, he looks great.
Should Payton escape to a more attractive football locale, the Saints will reap some significant draft capital from the transaction, as the longtime coach is still under contract in New Orleans.
Matt Kartozian/USA TODAY Sports
And so we’re left to wonder what happens as their 2022 slowly becomes flotsam. Should there have been any foresight? Can we really blame the Saints for seeing what we all saw, that sliver of opportunity?
From a more pessimistic point of view: Is there a plan to stabilize the quarterback position in the near future, or even the ability to do so? What happens with cornerstone defensive players such as Cam Jordan and Demario Davis, who are about to move past their age-33 seasons? Remember, this is a team that lost Marcus Williams in free agency and then traded C.J. Gardner-Johnson away for peanuts on the eve of the season, rather than extend him past his rookie deal. And if the defense softens—like almost any group dominant for some period of time in the modern NFL—do the Saints, as an organization, have much of a foundation to stand on?
These are big questions, perhaps too big for Week 7. However, it is fair to say that this team, even with its injuries, should have been able to club the lowly Cardinals on Thursday night, but allowed them to put up more than 40 points. Alvin Kamara was largely stonewalled and can only run to one side of the offensive line, adding to the Saints’ troublesome predictability in the run game. The Saints got to Kyler Murray just twice, and while blitzing him doesn’t make much sense, other similarly talented defensive lines have tortured this quarterback with four-man pressure.
This is a recycled, headache-inducing point for most New Orleans fans, and understandably so. No one likes to look at the most uncomfortable, pitted center of a problem. But at some point, the rest of the component parts are going to drop off from what was left of Payton’s good—but not Super Bowl-winning—Saints teams and there will need to be a rebuilding phase. Likely a painful one.
Over and over, everyone had to keep asking themselves whether it was worth it to keep this team together. They had to ask whether it made sense to keep layering on top of this core group of players, and, eventually, how much Payton accounts for in the win column as a single entity. While there is a future on this roster somewhere down the road, there is also a visible end of sorts, at least from our vantage point on Thursday night. The hope is that they can effectively address one before squandering the other.
