New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - Predict the Saints' Record Year 2023

Quote:

Originally Posted by voodooido (Post 971666)

So we upgrade at running back and quarterback, keep valued pieces on defense, and Tom Brady retires and you think we will lose one more game than last year? Slowly back away from the pipe. It’s bad for you

I predicted our exact record last year.

Carr is not even a definite upgrade at QB. Statistically he was worse than Dalton last year. He profiles as a Drew Bledsoe going from Patriots to Bills type, like 9 years of pretty good but not great, taking his act to a new team. The new team is not known for its offensive coaches skill, and it could almost as easily go very bad as pretty good. I think adding one win for Carr is generous.

At RB we mitigated not upgraded. Kamara is a year older and could be suspended anywhere from 0 to 17 games. People say 6 but nobody knows, Goodell might want to send a message. Anyway, Williams vultured a lot of TDs in a career year but was still below average in YPC. Williams will help mitigate Kamara's absence and provide an upgrade at #2 when Kamara is back, but Kamara's absense will still hurt. RB is a wash for me.

We did not keep the defensive players we value, we kept the ones we could afford. We lost players the market thought were worth more and replaced them with players the market thought were worth less. If the market thought the replacements were better, the market would have offered the replacements more than the players we replaced them with and we would have lost them too. Maybe we are geniuses and this guy who can do backflips but was 'eh' in KC will become a hall of famer for us. But there is nothing that can prove that now. What I see now is we lost a starting DT and we lost a young linebacker who got us 100 tackles but is expendable because we like the old linebacker to stay good forever and the hurt linebacker who forced him into action to never get hurt again. Fact is we have a lot less depth now, and the depth we lost was the young depth many teams would have lost the old and hurt guys and promoted.

Tom Brady retired. The Bucs will likely be garbage. But the Panthers will go from PJ Walked and Sam Darnold to the #1 overall pick. And the Falcons we beat twice by a hair are young and had lots of cap to spend and raided some of our solid players and took our best DC leaving us to replace him with one of Dennis Allen's old drinking buddies from skull and bones at yale who didn't lead any good defense last year.

We probably the oldest team in the league. Tom Brady retiring sealed that. That is not good. The Falcons and Panthers are young. Yet here we are resigning peat. I could get a sack on Peat by tossing a box of little debbie's in one direction and juking in the other.

Slowly back away from your own pipe. You probably thought we were gonna go 12-5 last year or something. The pipe you need to back away from is inside some CK boxers with the monogram ML.

Edit: Also worth mentioning that the Bucs replacement for Tom Brady, Baker Mayfield, did beat us last year. I think we will be better than the Bucs because they are doing a rebuilding year to get young and we are putting that off so we should be a little better for 1-2 years after which they can be much better if their rebuild is not a disaster. But still, Mayfield could go undefeated against us, he did last year.