New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - What I'm Realistically Looking For This Season

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rugby Saint II (Post 995927)

There are even more questions than we had at this time last year when the enthusiasm was fairly high before the bottom dropped out. The front office has apparently adopted a cleaner accounting system to get out from under the annual cap hell we go through every year. We signed mostly one year prove it deals with free agents to fill holes before the draft as usual.

Hurst decided to retire before the draft. He wasn't great but he was adequate when called on to play multiple positions.....mostly. He was a solid depth piece.
Peat was so bad that he couldn't play LT so they moved him to RT where he couldn't get his feet set. The team also tried him at right guard, I think, before finally settling in at LG for years. I must admit that I was surprised what a good job he did at LT this year. Although, he certainly took his sweet time! Sometimes the Saints are too quick to move a player to a new position if he doesn't hit the floor running.

McCoy, Peat, and our first round draft pick are the only players I feel comfortable with. That's only 3/5 of a starting O line that needs to be dominant again. We still have quite a few player who could fill in like Young but where's the depth? The team is apparently very high up on the way Young has developed from a late round draft pick into a competent backup. Maybe he can be even better with some real line coaching. Dougie Marrone doomed us and put us behind the learning curve a couple of years.

One of the things I'd like to see from the FO is to bring in another veteran O lineman before TC or wait to see who gets cut? Should we trade for a starter like when we traded Graham for Max Unger, who was a stud!

You are mixing up some details about Andrus Peat. He never failed at Left Tackle, he was drafted in 2015 after Terron Armstead was drafted in 2013 and became the starting Left Tackle in 2014. Armstead had a concussion and a hand injury in 2014 so maybe the front office felt they could have their cake and eat it too, taking Peat as insurance at Left Tackle but using him as a Right Tackle if Armstead stayed healthy. Instead, Peat just couldn't get the knack for playing Right Tackle and really struggled there. Eventually he shifted to Left Guard. I can't remember if he ever played Right Guard much. But instead of either bowing out or staying healthy, Terron Armstead was constantly suffering minor injuries. Peat filled in fairly admirably at Left Tackle when Armstead was out, but it probably hurt his development to be switching positions all the time. I view Peat as a cautionary tale not to spend a 1st round pick to draft a player to play out of position, as a backup plan, or for perceived theoretical positional flexibility. If you want to find a jack of all trades backup in the 5th round great, but you should look for stars in the 1st round, and most stars have honed their skills with great expertise at their natural position not playing musical chairs. Musical chairs is an egotistic novelty where the coaches try make themselves look brilliant and creative by putting players in a position that is likely to be bad for them and then taking credit on the rare occasions it isn't.

Anyway, Peat signed with the Raiders, so now you can feel good about 2/5ths of our oline.

Sure, scheme might cover some things, but if one oline completely misses his assignment, that scheme is going to be Derek Carr writing his wife and kids name on his hand to cover chronic brain injuries. Ultimately you don't pay great oline and great pass rushers big cash unless matchups matter, and they do. You know what scheme can cover? It could have covered not paying Cesar Ruiz $10 million plus a year to be perhaps one poppy seed or eye lash or dew drop more powerful than the average minimum salary journeyman oline. But I don't think it can cover that your only proven standout oline is McCoy and you have to hope a 1st rounder is ready to dominate now to give you a second, and the only guy who is not worried a dude on a forum who spent the entire offseason talking about how it takes young oline 5 extra years to develop these days because they are only allowed to read books about blocking written in Latin by priests in college these days.

My big questions are:

Will Carr get injured behind our questionable oline, continue to decline as a player much like many middle age mediocre QBs like Drew Bledsoe did at this time in their careers, hold steady and give us more of the same ups and downs, or somehow have a good year picking up where he left off against bad competition and low pressure the last few games and do it against good competition when we control our own destiny?

Will Kubiak be better or worse than Carmichael? Carmichael was a wizard when he was in the room with Sean Payton, but not when he became the offensive coordinator behind a lousy AFC West head coach fired for losing so many games (DA). So now we have Kubiak who is basically the same story in a different order, wizard when he was in the room with Kyle Shanahan, but not when he became the play caller behind a lousy AFC West head coach fired for losing so many games (Hackett). Hiring a young offensive coordinator like Kubiak made sense, but Carmichael, Hackett, and Allen were all once young too. Hopefully this is a situation where a fool strikes gold again, like when Haslett hired Mike McCarthy.

Will there be any pass rush? Chase Young had surgery immediately after signing and has a contract structure and past injury history that screams "I might not actually play much, who knows?" Rosies are confident Cam Jordan will bounce back, but he is at an age where the opposite is much more likely. Our draft pick DE from last year looked like a bust. Demario Davis is a year older.

Will the Falcons be better, or worse? The Falcons could be much better with a solid QB like Kirk Cousins, but Cousins is also coming off an ACL and is an older player. His backup tore the same ACL twice in college. Can you imagine the demoralization if the Falcons spent $180 million and the #8 overall pick at QB and their week 1 starter is Taylor Heineike. It could happen, week 1 or sometime after. The Falcons might be the mostly likely team in the division to win 12 games if everything goes right, but if it goes wrong they could be as or more likely than the Panthers to win 0 games. This matters a lot for the Saints. If things go wrong for the Falcons, the Saints could face the weakest division in NFL history with the two worst teams in the league and Saints and Bucs could both make the playoffs by sweeping the bottom half of their division, but would not likely dominate there.

Will the Saints find young stars? This is an old team. Even if we keep Lattimore, Kamara, Davis, Jordan, Ram, etc this year, the writing is on the wall for those guys. Unless Davis is going to open a DD56 supplement store in Manhattan he cannot continue to play at this level indefinitely. Kamara and Lattimore are old for their positions and its starting to show. Jordan and Ram are probably done. But you never know what can happen. Kool Aid could be better than anyone imagines. Some random late round pick could bust out. For the future, we need those things to happen. We also need to move on from more of these aging players, and having cheap alternatives will help with that. Maybe even Rattler. It will never get cheaper to move on from Carr, because if we don't move on we will likely restructure his contract which will make it move expensive to move on later than it appears now if you don't factor in a restructure.

NowI think this is a legit question. He was in the room with Kyle Shannahan, but the year before that he was in the room with Nathaniel Hackett and a historically bad Broncos offense.