I’m a fan of Deuce McAllister, the color man on the New Orleans Saints’ radio broadcasts. Deuce generally knows what he’s talking about when he gives instant reactions during games and he usually shoots straight about how the team is doing. So it’s a little out of character for me to call him out for a wrong take.
But he’s got a wrong take about Aaron Glenn, the former Saints defensive backs coach who just accepted the head coaching job offered by the New York Jets.
Glenn spent the 2024 season as the defensive coordinator for the Detroit Lions. He did an incredible job in that position, overcoming what should have been a catastrophic rash of injuries, including a broken leg suffered by the NFL’s best pass rusher Aidan Hutchinson, to produce one of the NFL’s best defenses for a team that went 15-2.
And all along, Glenn was seen as the leading option for the Saints to fill their own head coach opening.
But he jumped to the Jets instead, and McAllister said it isn’t a judgment on the quality of the Saints’ job…
Yeah, no.
The word is out about the Saints’ job. There’s a reason other NFL franchises are landing head coaches – Glenn to the Jets, Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson to the Chicago Bears, former Titans head coach Mike Vrabel to the New England Patriots – while the Saints aren’t making any headway.
The team’s upper management is a dumpster fire. Absolutely nobody thinks Gayle Benson knows what she’s doing as an owner – not only does she know nothing about football, she also has zero experience in running a winning organization. And Mickey Loomis, whom Benson has put completely in charge of the franchise, has brick by brick built the most catastrophic salary cap overage in the NFL – maybe in the history of the NFL.
It’s going to take years – three or four years at least – before the Saints aren’t completely hamstrung by the salary cap. Loomis has made a practice of extending contracts for veterans out long past the point where those contracts could possibly yield value on the field, rather than recognize that the Sean Payton-Drew Brees days are over and what the team desperately needs is a roster reset whereby it eats those contracts and clears them off the decks, tanks for high draft picks and goes younger and cheaper.
He’s done the opposite, and seems not to even understand the problems he’s caused. And in a press conference last week Loomis threw out a seemingly-endless string of delusions about the true state of the franchise…
At the time Loomis put on that presser, it was considered a lock that Glenn would be the next coach. Suddenly he’s signing on with the Jets.
Forgive us for not buying into the idea there isn’t a cause and effect here.
Right now the best available coaches aren’t looking at the Saints. The biggest name being circulated for the job is Mike McCarthy, who was just fired as the Dallas Cowboys’ head coach. McCarthy has been an NFL head coach for 18 seasons – 13 with the Packers and five in Dallas – and he’s got a respectable 174-112 record as a head coach. He’s taken a team to the playoffs in 12 of those 18 seasons and won a Super Bowl with Green Bay in 2010.
But after a 7-10 season this year the perception is he’s on the downhill side of his career.
Still, McCarthy might carry enough weight that he’d be able to tell Loomis what time it is, and also that he would have enough staying power to last through a protracted reset of the Saints’ roster seeing as though it would take at least two or three years to unwind all of the dead money and extended contracts for declining players so that a proper rebuild could take place.
But the question is why McCarthy would want to coach the Saints rather than the other options, like Las Vegas or Jacksonville.
Glenn was the guy who made the most sense. He’s young, he’s dynamic and his resume sparkles. The Saints couldn’t get him because the job isn’t perceived well and the fundamentals are poor.
McCarthy aside, Bills offensive coordinator Joe Brady, who like Glenn spent time on Sean Payton’s staff in New Orleans but really made his mark as LSU’s passing game coordinator in 2019, might be the new sparkly hire. And if it turns out to be Brady that would be nice, but we notice that Joe Brady looks like a genius when he’s working with Drew Brees, Joe Burrow and Josh Allen – and not so much of a genius when he’s working with lesser quarterbacks.
That calls into question why he’d want to coach the Saints instead of a team like Jacksonville, where Trevor Lawrence could be formed into a top-level quarterback, or Dallas, where Dak Prescott has been good (though not quite great, and maybe a quarterback whisperer is what he needs) for several years.
But more likely, it’s going to be Giants assistant head coach and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka, Dolphins defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver or Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore getting the job. Perhaps there’s a great coach in that trio, but none are particularly exciting.
Maybe that fits. Because the Saints’ job certainly isn’t exciting to the coaches. That’s clear, whether Deuce wants to admit it or not.
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