BakoSaint

I noticed something interesting in Derek Carr's response to Michael Thomas' social media posts:

https://www.si.com/nfl/saints/news/d...homas-comments

Carr: "... You know, if that's how he wants to view it and how he wants to see it, completely fine by me. And I understand also that when I came into the building, we have Chris Olave, who they were trying to train to be the No. 1 guy, so all of the sudden, every rep and every read in practice is Chris first. And as a superstar that Mike is and what he has been, I can understand you're dealing with all the injury noise. You're dealing with now, Chris has become a guy, and he loves Chris, that's his guy at Ohio State, all that, but I can understand where the frustration begins to build..."

Everyone seems to be taking Carr's side or MT's side but I noticed something more in Carr's comment. We can argue about how literally to take the comment, but if we take it somewhat literally that the offense was very focused on Olave, and we pay attention the words not the conflict, Carr is saying that in practice "every rep and every read is Olave first because "they were trying to train (him) to be the #1 guy."

To me, that is more interesting than the Carr / MT conflict. I am not an offensive mastermind but based on our results neither are our coaches. But, one basic preconception I have is that a successful offense is built around being unpredictable and spreading the ball around. That's what made Brees' and Payton's offense great while the Falcon's consistently folded with Ryan and Jones. One dimensional offenses fail. If you have a Randy Moss, Megatron, Julio Jones, Andre Johnson, Justin Jefferson, or Larry Fitzgerald in their prime you can force them the ball at every opportunity and have an explosive offense, but there is a reason none of those guys ever won a ring, when you do that you become predictable and when you reach the playoffs some team will be good enough to take that player out of the game, and you will have no answer. To win in this league you absolutely have to spread the ball around. You cannot succeed being one dimensional. And to spread the ball around you need to practice spreading the ball around. You cannot have one receiver be the the '#1 guy' on 'every rep and every read.' Perhaps that your #1 receiver can be the first read on 30-40% of practice reps and game plays but to spread the ball around you need to practice and execute plays for your entire offense not just one player.

If you leave the entire rest of your offense 'eating leftovers' to feed the '#1 guy' you throw everything off balance. Carr is saying that, not a greedy #2 receiver, not an attention hungry journalist, our veteran QB who was in a feud with our #2 receiver is letting it slip that our coaches plan was to focus our entire offense around Chris Olave as our #1 receiver to the extent where 'everything' was built around 'Olave first' on 'every rep.' If you look at our season this tracks. Shaheed's pff scores were similar to Olave's in 2022 and Shaheed was more electric at times in 2022 and early 2023 but then everything was diverted to Olave. Michael Thomas was having a down year before injury. Juwon Johnson was forgotten in the offense until late in the year. Jimmy Graham was ignore in the red zone until late in the year and barely utilized in general. Kamara had an off year and his yard per catch were down because he was primarily utilized, not in designed plays targeting him, but as a secondary short dump off option if Olave was triple covered. Everyone in the offense was down every Olave, who we forced by shear will to produce 81 yards and 1 TD more than in 2022.

Why would we want to do this? To purposely become a 1D offense in the era of spread offenses? Mickey ****ing Loomis. I have said many times that Mickey Loomis is a PR guy first and a GM second if at all. And he is not just any PR guy, he is a cunning but highly paranoid and self conscious PR guy. And going into the season, he was probably hyper focused on what was the biggest criticism of him at the time: the disasterous draft trade with the Eagles to that cost us tons of picks including Jalen Carter to 'win now' in 2022 with Trevor Penning and Chris Olave. So, he likely gave orders to DA (who he loves because DA takes orders and doesn't ask questions) that the two stars of the team this year had to be Chris Olave and Trevor Penning, to make Mickey Loomis look like a genius. To make them stars, Penning needed to start at Left Tackle and Chris Olave needed to be featured as a 1AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA receiver with a target share that would make even Jefferson and Adams jealous.

For Chris Olave this meant that every rep and every read in practice needed to be focuses on Olave. Olave needed to be the #1 option on every call. If he is not open, Carr can't throw it because Carr throwing too many interceptions would reflect poorly on Loomis too, but everything needed to be built around never missing an opporunity to practive or execute making Olave look amazing, not like the good solid young #1 receiver he is, but like the generational talent that would justify the Eagles trade and protect Mickey Loomis.

For Trevor Penning this meant starting at Left Tackle even if he wasn't ready, and compromising the entire rest of the offense to 'help' with chip block's etc that threw them off their routes, every other target except the golden boy Olave of course. And as Penning failed, and helping Penning was never enough, the plan had to change to focus even more on the vision of Olave as a generational star to make up for it.

If you think about it, our entire season can be explained by Carr's quote. We sacrificed unpredictability and spreading out the ball on offense to focus on propping up Olave and Penning to justify Loomis's stupid trade and bail out good ole Moonshine Mickey. We fed into Carr's one dimensional tendencies from his worst season when the addition of Davante Adams proved a subtraction. We put too much pressure on Olave and caused him to nearly break down mid season and start taking plays off. We divided the locker the room. We stunted the development of Shaheed and Johnson. We alienated veteran leaders like Thomas and Graham sending one to free agency and the other to retirement. We had Alvin Kamara publicly criticizing the offense. We nearly got Carr killed by giving Penning 'reps' at Left Tackle for 'development.' And the whole point, all along, we to prop up a garbage trade to cover Mickey's ass.

AsylumGuido

Sorry, I grew totally bored after the second paragraph. Why are you always looking for something to complain about?

Of course, I skipped down to the last sentence knowing full well it would all come out to your slamming Loomis. Yup, there it was. Go figure.

SmashMouth

He may not be off base... we may never truly know the inner struggles ... all we can do is speculate and try to decipher the clues from the teammates .