SmashMouth

It's becoming an annual rite of NFL Draft season: Why don't the New Orleans Saints pick LSU players?

The last time the Saints drafted an LSU player was 2010 when Al Woods went in the fourth round. He's the only Tiger selected during the Sean Payton era (2006 to the present) and it was six years before that to find the next one, wide receiver Devery Henderson, in the second round in 2004.
New Orleans Saints general Mickey Loomis addressed the reality of the draft lottery and insisted there's no bias against the school 90 miles down the road. LSU has produced 69 NFL Draft picks in the 11 seasons Payton and Loomis have been in charge.

"Look, there's a lot of good LSU players in the league and guys that we have coveted," Loomis said. "It's kind of the luck of the draw in the draft. At the time that we are picking, we don't necessarily have them on our board or they got taken before. There's a lot of circumstances that arise that causes us not to have an LSU player. It's not because we don't think they're good players. That's for sure."

Could 2017 be the year? LSU has 12-14 players who could be picked in the draft and four of them are at the Senior Bowl this week: wide receiver Travin Dural, center Ethan Pocic, linebacker Duke Riley and cornerback Tre'Davious White. Each one has met with Saints officials.

"They've had a lot of good players there, guys that have been very successful in our league, guys we liked a lot that we had really good grades," Loomis said. "But we only have 7 picks a year."


read more

K Major

Kwon Alexander & Deion Jones were in our back yard yet we chose James Laurinitus (flat out awful) last off season.

I'm not saying we should look exclusively at LSU, but area scouts definitely need to do their homework leading up to this years draft.

Rugby Saint II

This circles back to the need for good scouting and evaluating how well a player will fit into the system......and just how poorly we've been at finding the right talent for the scheme(which keeps changing 3-4/4-3 for example). I don't think we had a clear cut vision for the future to give to the scouts, although Ireland does seem to doing a fine job of getting us back on track since he came on board.