QBREES9

He had an off year.

jlouhill

I'm not for canning him after one year. Let's see what he can do hopefully with a few different players. Now if the D doesn't continue to improve into next year then he needs to go.
Now the special teams coach, He needs to GO!

Vrillon82

I find it hard to blame Spags in this debacle.

I think the problem is the players on Defense side is just not that great.

I mean look at players who were starting on our Defense that had left for other teams, they never really made it out of 2nd string status except Tracy Porter, and Porter got burned repeatedly in Denver.

SloMotion

I consider the way NFL defenses are structured today. You have a bunch of role players with one, two, maybe standout players in key positions. Other than SFran, who really has more than that? Green Bay is a perfect example. Take out Woodson and/or Matthews and the defense suffers.

New Orleans didn't have those key players, as has been pointed out. I think in light of that and everything else that went on, you have to give Spags at least another season.

There's also the wording to consider. The Saints allowed the most points, they're not historically the worst defense ever this season. Tennessee actually ranked below New Orleans this season. I've brought this up before ... the NFL is all about winning or losing.

IMO, any team with a worse win/loss record this season, had a worse defense than the Saints. The title of "Worst defense in history" would then be awarded to the 2008 Detroit Lions (0-16) with the '77 Buccaneers(2-12) coming in a close second for their inaugral 0-12 run.

Spags ain't going anywhere anyway, so just start thinking happy thoughts for next season, .

biloxi-indian

Wrong strategy on Spags. Let's blame the players and promote Spags as the best DC in the league. This would entice one of the owners who just fired a HC to consider Spags as his next SAVIOR.

Then we can bring in another DC and really confuse professional players making millions who neither fit into either round holes or square pegs.

Sarcasm off.

insidejob

He should be given the chance to hire his own position coaches and draft some players before any changes are made. Also, Payton isn't going to get rid of the guy before he even gets to work with him.

SloMotion

... a bit confusing, but after reading through it a few times, I got it, .

SaintsBro

Well, I look back to the worst of the worst, maybe it was the Chiefs or the Packers game, 0-4, or a little bit after that. And Spags had this press conference barely ten minutes after the game ended, where he was clearly fed up with it all, and you could tell he was pulling his hair out over it, he was like, "honestly, I don't know what it all is, it's a bunch of different things, but we're going to figure it out, and we will fix it."

And certain people on here in this forum had a complete COW over that, they took that one little bit of what he said out of context and went ballistic over it -- "he doesn't KNOW what the problem is! He's INCOMPETENT!" and they just threw Spags under the bus like so much hot garbage, four or five weeks in. They demanded he "take responsibility," ignoring the fact that he already DID take responsibility, two sentences earlier at the podium, and he already said it was unacceptable and that he wasn't happy with it. But certain people just wrote the ticket on him, punched it, and that was it.


And then he did fix it. Sort of. Kind of. They got better. A little bit. Well not as much as we'd like, but hey. That Eagles and Buccaneers games were kinda fun to watch on defense. Some of it in the last half of the year was not entirely painful.

I think Spags literally learned what he had to work with, while wearing his hard hat on the job site, with out-dated blueprints and no architect to guide him, and whatever you build under those kind of ridiculous conditions is probably not going to be this enormous towering monumental edifice of impregnable defense, like some people here seem to expect.

We're an OFFENSIVE team with a leaky defense. Not very likely going to have a dominant skull-crushing defense anytime soon, until Payton leaves. You go 10+ wins for a bunch of years, in a row like that, WINNING, it hurts the quality of your draft picks that are on the board when you get to pick in the draft, and that shows. This was a transition year anyway, and with no head coach, it came out worse than expected. Ugh.

Tobias-Reiper

Just an observation: Mike Ditka was never a good coach in Chicago. It was Buddy Ryan's defense who carried that team.

RailBoss

Another one is Jim Haslett who had a pretty good D while he was Head Coach here but couldn't get the whole package right. He winds up in Washington and is doing a solid job even with a lot of injuries.