There's no sugarcoating things: Through 10 games, the New Orleans Saints have not seen the level of success they were hoping for, particularly in a frustrating trip to Minnesota leading into a bye week.
But the team won't apologize for where it stands in the NFC South, sitting atop the division with a 5-5 record. There are seven games left, and task now is for the Saints to finish off the season and punch a ticket to the postseason, as Dennis Allen explained on WWL this week.
Listen to the full, exclusive interview with Saints head coach Dennis Allen in the player above. Can't see the embed? Click here.
“We control our own destiny, which is a good feeling to have," Allen said, "and we’ve got to come out and play much better football after this bye. We’ve got 7 games left, ... so it’s right there in front of us. We’ve got to be able to take advantage of it."
While the 2023 season has come with frustrations, it's also come with advantageous circumstances. The past two seasons the Saints were on the fringe of the playoff picture the whole way, constantly pushing a boulder up a hill and never reaching the top. Both seasons resulted in late-season playoff misses. In 2022 the Saints were 3-7 through 10 games. In 2021 they were also 5-5, but in the midst of a 5-game losing streak with then-starting QB Jameis Winston lost to injury.
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The Saints closed out their final seven games at 4-3- both times. This year they're set up with four games against divisional opponents and a majority those games at home. The Lions are the only team left on the schedule with a winning record (7-2). The other five teams -- Panthers, Falcons twice, Giants, Bucs and Rams -- have a combined record of 14-33 (.298 winning %).
"Certainly it hasn’t gone as well as we would’ve hoped, but we have seven games left, four of those at home, four of those against division opponents," Allen said. "So we’ve just got to be able to come back after this bye and start playing a little bit more consistently and a better brand of football.”
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MORE FROM DENNIS ALLEN
What limited Taysom Hill's role in Minnesota?
“I think that the thing that impacted Taysom’s role was being down so many points early in the game and having to get back into a catchup mode and then we had a little bit of success of being able to do that and stuck with it throughout the remainder of the game. I think maybe there in the fourth quarter when it was a one-score game, you know, we might’ve been able to have gotten back to a little bit more of the run game and utilizing Taysom, but some of the other things that have been fairly effective and allowed ourselves to get back into the game. I think Taysom’s role was more affected by being down so many points in the game.”
Shouldn't that be avoided?
"That’s certainly something that as we get out of the game and we evaluate hey, what would we have done differently? Maybe we could’ve got back to that a little bit, so I think it’s a fair point, and certainly we always look at what we did well and what we didn’t do and there’s always a lot of things when you come out of the game wishing you’d have done something differently.”
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Why so many penalties?
“I addressed the team after the game in terms of we’ve got to be more accountable and do our jobs better, and really it’s all of us, coaches, players, everybody. All of us have to do a better job. We’ve got to eliminate the penalties, because when you really look at it, there was penalties that killed offensive drives. We get the ball down there in the red zone, we get a holding penalty where we would’ve had first and 10 at the 11, we end up with a 1st and 20, we can’t convert. We had a 2nd and 11 sack. Defensively in the red area and we ahve an illegal contact foul, which instead of being third and 18, they’ve got the ball first and 10. So, you know, that was obviously a big factor, particularly in the first half of the game.”
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What will the bye week look like?
“Much like it’s looked like around here for at least as long as I can remember, same thing as we did last year. The players will be off. I want them to get away from football just a little bit. I want them to get their bodies right, get their minds right, get themselves back healthy and ready to go so that we can really take advantage of this time after the bye. Obviously this week from a coaching standpoint, a lot of this week is going to be, you know, looking at ourselves, doing a little bit of self-scouting in terms of where we are throughout the first 10 games of the season. Again, like I said earlier, what are we doing well, what are we not doing well, what are we asking out players to do, how well are they doing it. Are we asking them to do the right things. I think there’s just a lot of that that goes into this week and then as we get toward the end of the week, we’ll start looking at and planning for Atlanta.”