It is going to be quite a bit harder if you look at the details:

In 2023 the Saints were expected to have a historically weak strength of schedule: their opponents had a .427 winning percentage the previous season. Yet, expectations do not always usually come to reality, and its common for the real results to regress toward the mean as they say since the best teams are rarely as good and the worst teams rarely as bad as the previous years.

Yet, when the actual 2023 season came to pass, the Saints schedule was about as easy as advertised. I can't find the exact number but I have seen numbers like .449 or .433. It was one of the easiest schedules, not just that season, but in decades. Pre-season strength of schedule is often reported but post-season its much more quiet, I think because the way the numbers usually regress to the mean does not make for exciting stories. Pre-season strengths of schedule show stark differences because the last places teams get to play a bunch of last place teams and the first place teams get to play a bunch of first place teams, but in reality we know the first and last place teams the next season are usually not the same so inevitably that easy schedule is not so easy, except for 2023 Saints and Falcons where it did turn out that way.

But even the final results of your opponents winning percentage does not tell the full story on strength of schedule. Timing plays a role that is harder to factor in. The Saints played a lot of banged up teams and backup QBs in 2023. Their historically easy schedule was probably even easier than it looked when you factor in Tommy Devito, Tyson Bagent, Joshua Dobbs, and Gardner Minshew. They also did not play either Super Bowl team. There were 9 NFL teams with 11 or more wins in 2023 and the Saints only played 1 of the 9.

In 2024 the Saints play a schedule of teams that went .453 last year. This not as easy as .427 going into 2023. Considering .500 is neutral, .453 is .47 below that, and .427 is .73 below that, the 2023 schedule was 55% easier versus the mean.

But strength of schedule tends to revert to the mean, and 2023 was an outlier in not doing that so much. We also know the Falcons added Kurt Cousins and that historically it would be very unlikely for the Panthers to stay so bad two years in a row, but is not taken into account just looking at last years records. And those teams that won 11 or more games last year, where we only played 1 of 9. In 2024 we play 4 of those teams. We also play the Super Bowl Champs on the road. But two games against Carolina, who went 2-15 in 2023, drag down our strength of schedule.

Do we have a fairly easy schedule in 2024? Sure, it looks that way. Maybe it will be the easiest for the year, maybe the 10th easiest if Carolina isn't quite so bad and Cousins improves the Falcons. But, 2023 was historically easy, one of the easiest in the 32 team era. Its not the same. And if our schedule is easier than average all it means is a lower draft pick if we are mediocre and some remote chance of a road wildcard birth where we get mopped up by teams that are on a higher level than we have a chance to prepare for in the regular season. Steel sharpens steel. A weak schedule is not a good thing in the NFL. But our schedule is not as weak as it was in 2023.

Last season was basically the “easy” schedule Powerball winner.

It is what it is.

Saints play in a weak division with what should be the worst team in the NFL by a wide margin for the foreseeable future, playing them (Carolina) twice is going to buoy the easy schedule. The QB slate this year is much more challenging vs last year.

This year we play COUSINS, COUSINS, MAHOMES, HEBERT, WATSON, LOVE, DAK, HURTS, HIGHLAND PARK & potentially DANIELS.

Last season we played Bagent 🤔 & the passing Pasiano.

Against DECENT QB’s we faced in Love, Lawrence, Highland Park & Jared Goff?? 0-4

After season's end our strength of schedule turned out to be harder than first press clippings suggested. Methinks it'll be the same this year, except we have Kubiak at the helm. So really it's a roll of the dice, at the end of the day.

This ^^^

I don't think many realize how great of an affect a competent offensive design and execution can have on a team's success. Pete Carmichael sucked. He hogtied everyone on the offense with his failures in design and playcalling. Just a single score per game we would have walked away with the division.

This ^^^

I don't think many realize how great of an affect a competent offensive design and execution can have on a team's success. Pete Carmichael sucked. He hogtied everyone on the offense with his failures in design and playcalling. Just a single score per game we would have walked away with the division.

This ^^^

I don't think many realize how great of an affect a competent offensive design and execution can have on a team's success. Pete Carmichael sucked. He hogtied everyone on the offense with his failures in design and playcalling. Just a single score per game we would have walked away with the division.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda… Where have we heard that before? This time next year, you’ll be saying it again, and we might be thinking about a new HEAD COACH (imagine that, as if it makes a difference, because it does) as we enter into yet another year of redevelopment.

I don't think many realize how great of an affect a competent offensive line can have on a team's success. And ours relies on Penning and features zero tackles who have the combination of a previous successful NFL season and cartilage between the bones in their knees and a starting guard named 'TBD scheme will make up for it' playing next to one of those tackles.

Sometimes a competent offensive scheme cannot be executed without a competent offensive line, and attempts to compensate for incompetent offensive linemen wreck the scheme because nobody can focus on anything but extra blocking assignments to cover for ole ferdinand the bull at left tackle.

It's not just Kubiak. It's Benton as OL coach. Didn't really research his track record. The bio the Saints put out suggests an improvement over the previous year. So we'll see. BTW, why did the Saints publish a picture of him in another team's colors?

Exactly, Smash. Last year was last year and anything offensively speaking was tainted by Carmichael and staff's incompetence. Kubiak is only one piece of the additions made to the coaching staff. To ignore the greatly needed additions to the rest of the staff is extremely shortsighted.

I don't think many realize how great of an affect a competent offensive line can have on a team's success. And ours relies on Penning and features zero tackles who have the combination of a previous successful NFL season and cartilage between the bones in their knees and a starting guard named 'TBD scheme will make up for it' playing next to one of those tackles.

Sometimes a competent offensive scheme cannot be executed without a competent offensive line, and attempts to compensate for incompetent offensive linemen wreck the scheme because nobody can focus on anything but extra blocking assignments to cover for ole ferdinand the bull at left tackle.

Tell me, Bako, exactly how many snaps have you seen our current offensive linemen take this season with another year of development and work with what should be a far superior offensive coaching staff, more than one of which have a great reputation of developing offensive linemen? Zero? Yup. That's right. Zero.

How silly of me to think that the players who actually take the field and how they looked in the most recent games they actually played matters. Obviously the Carolina Panthers will go 20-0 and win the Super Bowl because I have seen exactly 'zero yup thats right zero' snaps of their players 'this season with another year of development and work with what should be a far superior coaches staff, more than one of which have a great reputation.' Clearly if Dave Canales could get a washed up Baker Mayfield to the playoffs, he will be able to instantly fix all the problems with Bryce Young and turn Diontae Johnson and Adam Thielen into Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. Clearly will all the years he spent in Seattle, Canales will instantly turn the Panthers defense into a reincarnation of the Legion of Boom. If we just ignore all the previous performance of every player on their roster and focus on positives in their assistant coaching staffs biographies even if those positives really only amount to a fairly similar playoff outcome than prior years before they joined the team, there is nobody the Panthers can't beat.

Heck, one could argue the Panthers could even beat us, holding the Saints to 17-3 with our only 3 losses coming to the Panthers. Because honestly if you look at 2023 the Bucs did a lot better than expected with Canales as an offensive coach, they were not expected to succeed with Mayfield and were supposed to be last in the division after losing Brady. Meanwhile you cannot say the same for Kubiak. The 49ers played in the NFC Championship in the 2022 season before he arrived, and were only eliminated due to a QB injury in that championship game. Then the next year they did not have a QB injury, did go the Superbowl, and lost. The Bucs performed much better than expectations in 2023, the 49ers were pretty well within expectations as a favorite to be in the NFC Championship game, and achieving the median outcome of winning it but losing the next game.

Essentially your argument is that Kubiak is a miracle worker. We can go into the season minus three starting oline, replace one with an unproven rookie and the other two with minimum salary camp bodies, and we are going to dramatically improve. The problem is that argument could be used for any team with any coaching change. And I don't see the miracles on Kubiak's resume. Were the 2023 49ers way better then expected? They had a very similar season to 2022. Were the 2022 Broncos great? No, they were worse than expected. Did the Vikings ever win their division during Kubiak's 3 years there? No. They finished 2nd or 3rd and manages one wildcard win in 3 years with an expensive QB, similar to their track record before and after Kubiak.

I am not saying Klint Kubiak will not be a good coach. He may or may not be. But he is not god. He has not engineered a massive improvement anywhere he has been. He is not so amazingly unrivaled in his talent that we could line up a bunch of camp bodies on oline and break records with offense. He is human. Its reasonable to expect that our offensive line will be a considerable weakness based on the past performance of our players and the lack of any experienced healthy Tackle on the roster and the lack of a mobile QB.