WhoDat!656

Next year will be interesting!

Things haven’t gone as planned for the New Orleans Saints this season. They might very well still end up in the place they were planning to land — atop the NFC South — but nobody could have imagined they would take this path to get there. At 5-8, it has been a wildly disappointing campaign for one of the preseason Super Bowl favorites. That came to a head this week, when Sean Payton responded to the team’s fourth consecutive loss at home,1 a 41-10 shellacking by Carolina, by releasing reserve wideout Joe Morgan and benching safety Kenny Vaccaro,2 the team’s 2013 first-round pick.

The second-year safety was at the core of what was supposed to be the most improved aspect of this team. Vaccaro, who impressed as a rookie before suffering a broken ankle in Week 16 last season, was shockingly joined at safety by former Bills Pro Bowler Jairus Byrd, arguably the highest-rated defensive player available at the beginning of free agency. Even though the Saints were only a few million dollars under the salary cap and hadn’t yet resolved the contract status of star tight end Jimmy Graham, the Saints gave Byrd a six-year, $54 million deal in hopes of forming the league’s best safety tandem east of Seattle.

It didn’t work. Byrd was wildly disappointing before going on injured reserve with a torn meniscus in early October, often disappearing against the run while failing to pick up any interceptions. Vaccaro didn’t fare much better, as we saw when Jonathan Stewart ran right by his vacated edge for a 69-yard touchdown last week.

Free-agent signings fail and impressive rookies disappoint, but this has been particularly egregious for the Saints because of how they financially leveraged this season. The Saints were about as all in to win in 2014 as a team can be, given how they structured the deals of Byrd and a number of other high-priced veterans on their roster. That would have been fine by Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis if it had delivered a title, but instead, there’s a good chance next year’s Saints team will have less talent than this one. A lot less.

Blown Up on the Bayou: How the Saints Ended Up in Salary-Cap Hell «

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