BakoSaint

But under DA the Saints have had one losing season and one 9-8 thanks to a historically easy schedule season. One cannot emphasize strongly enough how easy the 2023 Saints schedule was. I believe it was a top 3 easy schedule for any team the last 20 years. With about 20 years and 32 teams thats 640 schedules of which the 2023 Saints had one of the 3 easiest. That puts the 2023 Saints schedule not just in the top 1% of easy scheduled, but the top 0.5% of easy schedules. Essentially the Saints have performed like a losing team both seasons of Dennis Allen's tenure, but were saved in 2023 by a scheduling miracle. If the Saints end 2024 with the easiest schedule in the league again, merely having the easiest schedule of 32 teams will just put the Saints in the top 3% of easy schedules, not the history making ease of 2023.

In addition, in order to achieve mediocre losing team level performance under Dennis Allen, the Saints have essentially spent more future dollars than any team in the league, since they played 2022 the most over the 2023 cap of any team in the league by far and 2023 the most over the 2024 cap of any team in the league by far. Loomis lovers will say this is just how we run our team, and it gives us an advantage, and the rest of the league is beginning to copy us, but if that were so, it would imply that given a league leading financial advantage, DA still has a losing record as Saints HC, which should make DA even worse in their book than mine. Did the Saints get under the cap in the end, sure, but the Saints have been living month to month on the credit card and making the minimum payments and balance transfer offers to juggle the debt, and what that has achieve is 7-10 and a historically anomalous 9-8.

The Saints success under Brees and Payton cannot be denied, but when you consider strength of schedule and spending, the Saints under Dennis Allen are not 'pretty darn good' as your 'only one losing season' paints the picture. Also Dennis Allen has 5 seasons under his belt with 0 playoff appearances and Derek Carr has 10.

When I hear Dennis Allen speak I would hire him as an accountant. He seems competent and serious enough. He knows the X's and O's. Mickey Loomis' background is accounting, so he is not used to big personalities or a lot of noise, and at times Sean Payton probably rubbed him the wrong way. But the thing is, there are only 32 head coaching jobs in the NFL and only 5-10 who have what it takes to be exceptional, and you can't just be competent and serious you have to be extraordinary, a leader, maybe a big personality, maybe extraordinary genuine and intuitive socially, maybe the relentless general, maybe the mad creative genius, but you can't be the accountant, you can't be just the competent serious guy without a lot of any form of social skills, leadership, creativity, vision, OR accountability. You have to bring something extraordinary. Players have to love you, fear you, admire you, or be awed by you, they can't just kind of respect that you are this colleague with a corner office who did pretty good in a lesser role and seems to know some things and probably would not get them audited.