The New Orleans Saints have moved on from Pete Carmichael, and several of his former players have come out with strong support of the longtime OC.
That's in large part due to his outsized and often under appreciated contributions to the Saints' Super Bowl run in the 2009 season, which Lance Moore broke down on WWL Radio this week.
Listen to the full interview with Lance Moore in the player above. Can't see the embed? Click here.
"We need to be thanking Pete," Moore told WWL's Bobby Hebert and Steve Geller. "We don’t win that Super Bowl if we don’t have Pete Carmichael. That’s how important of a piece he was to not only just creating the offense, but making sure that we’re put in the best position to be successful on the field."
But it's what happened on the field in the final two seasons of Carmichael's tenure in New Orleans that brought on this week's change, with the OC being thrust into a more prominent, play-calling role on Dennis Allen's staff following the sudden departure of Sean Payton.
The 2023 Saints offense was particularly slow burn and things getting hot at the end of the year, which featured six consecutive games with more than 20 points scored and a 4-2 record, was not enough to save the OC's job.
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"There’s an art to play-calling and I just don’t think that he — I’m not gonna say he wasn’t capable — I just think that it was a little bit more than maybe he could handle," Moore said.
Still, as Moore explains, the Saints would be smart not to fool themselves into thinking that erasing Carmichael from the equation will solve all of their problems. The pressure is going to be on Pete's successor from Day 1 to prove the move right, and there won't be much leash to work with.
"Maybe [Carmichael] wasn’t the right guy. Time will tell," Moore continues. "But I’m hoping that if that is the issue that they saw, they bring somebody in that is exactly the epitome of that, somebody who can come in and demand the room and be a very, very vocal and emotional leader for that group that I feel like at times needed one. ... I know the fans are gonna be critical, but it’s going to be a situation where all the former players are critical, especially the ones who played in this offense under Pete, and we’re gonna have our eyes on them to figure out if the person they’re going to bring in is going to be good enough or not.”