Jameis Winston’s response to how he felt after the Saints’ comeback win in the 2022 opener against Atlanta seems more appropriate now than ever.
I have seen some painful games as a New Orleans Saints fan.
My first experience, watching a wild playoff battle with the San Francisco 49ers in 2012 from a bar in the French Quarter, laid the foundation for future heartbreak. More recently, last year’s matchup in Denver against a mediocre Broncos team forced me switch off before the game reached its inevitable, nauseating conclusion.
How low can you go?
However, I am struggling to think of a game where the Saints have made me feel as hopeless as they did in their 44-13 rout by the Seattle Seahawks. This looked like a high school team thrown into the SEC.
Thankfully, for my sanity more than anything, I was not a Saints fan through the ‘paper-bag years’ before Drew Brees and Sean Payton swept into the city, transforming the team into a perennial contender.
Maybe it is the rock bottom you have to reach in a rebuild. Many Saints fans have been calling for the team to tear it down and start again since Brees left. So surely we cannot complain now it is actually happening, right?
The blame game
There is enough of it to go around right now. The team looked grossly unprepared against Seattle.
The tone was set with repeated disasters on special teams and double-digit penalties that would have made the England football team in a major tournament look competent.
It is easy to blame the players on the field when you see mistakes: penalties, missed tackles, dropped catches. But it goes higher than that.
Coaching will always be called into question. Where was the killer instinct from coach Kellen Moore when he chose to go for a field goal at the end of the second half when the team were already down 38-3?
I am not sure how much momentum a field goal gives you at that point. But it goes higher than that.
The buck stops here
All roads lead to General Manager Mickey Loomis.
This team has not drafted well for years. Excluding the legendary 2017 draft class that gained Marshon Lattimore, Ryan Ramczyk, Marcus Williams, Trey Hendrickson and Alvin Kamara, New Orleans has consistently failed to hit.
A huge part of this is the approach Loomis takes to trading picks, often first rounders, reaching for players that rarely work out.
He throws draft picks around like candy. It is extremely rare for the Saints to go into a draft with all their picks.
And when they do, you can almost hear Mickey champing at the bit to package some up and launch them at another team to jump up a few places.
Two first-round picks for Johnathan Sullivan in 2003 and two first-round picks for Marcus Davenport in 2018 are possibly some of the most egregious. It is unsustainable.
The deadline looms for Loomis
Much has been made of the ‘salary cap hell’ the team has found itself in since the departure of Brees and Payton. But if Loomis had put together decent drafts in the meantime, the issue would likely never have existed.
He appears to have the safest job in the world. He trades away current and future assets; appears blind to major issues in the locker room and coaching staff; and remains completely unaccountable for any of the team’s current woes. Yet he is still there.
Most of the league would kill for an owner like Gayle Benson. She provides almost limitless money but remains mostly uninvolved in the day-to-day running of the team. But now we need her to get involved.
A change is needed. The organisation is suffering, and its fans and players with it. We are not generally managing and we are not generally managed.
Mickey Loomis needs to go and Ms Benson is the only one who can make it happen.
