When a team sinks to 2-5 like the Saints did Thursday night, everything is on the table.
Changes need to be made somewhere, and they start from the top-down. No, this isn't an article calling for a head coaching change, but it is calling for changes by the head coach, as Jeff Nowak lays out on the postgame edition of the Inside Black & Gold podcast after a 42-34 Saints defeat at the hands of the Arizona Cardinals.
"I think that from a management perspective, from a production perspective, from a coaching perspective, you need to adjust, and I think DA should stop calling defensive plays," Nowak said. "I said this prior to the game and I feel even more strongly about it now. Whether [DA] is the best option to be the play-caller or not, I don't know that he is at his best as a head coach on game days when he is calling defensive plays"
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Will such a change cure all the Saints' ills? Probably not, but you can start there and see how things fall into place. It would also allow Allen to focus solely on his duties as the head coach. Those include post-halftime interviews after his QB threw back-to-back pick-6s that changed the game. Asked what he said to Andy Dalton in the locker room, his response was "keep doing what you're doing." If nothing else, a head coach should be expected to anticipate how that statement might be received by a national TV audience.
But this is also a team that's blown any chance for a margin of error and its own sloppiness could be tagged as the biggest factor. If a turnaround is coming, it has to happen now. If it doesn't, the Saints will soon be staring down a lost season and get a twist of the knife from the Eagles who own New Orleans' first-round pick in the 2023 draft.
It also happens to be a contingency you've planned for. Ryan Nielsen called defensive plays in the preseason. He can be trusted to do so again.
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Can all the defensive woes be placed at the feet of the head coach? Of course not. This was a group trying to win a game without its top three cornerbacks (Marshon Lattimore, Paulson Adebo and Bradley Roby, not to mention veteran PJ Williams on IR and CJ Gardner-Johnson now plays for the Eagles). It's been without 2021 first-round pick Payton Turner a majority of the year. Even when players have been in the right positions, the tackling hasn't happened. It's a group that has regressed at a speed you wouldn't have thought possible prior to the season. As a team the Saints are ranked 31st in the NFL in points allowed per game (28.6). A team that once went nearly three seasons without allowing a 100-yard rusher in a game is now averaging 123 rushing yards allowed per game (No. 22 in the NFL). Little is working and much needs to be fixed.
Allen told Nowak Friday afternoon that the team will be "looking at everything" in terms of how to get better results on the defensive side of the ball, and he expressed optimism that key players could be returning from injury after the extended break. But he doesn't anticipate changes in how play-calling or game-planning are handled.
"We're not getting the results that we want," Allen said. "And so we've got to look at what we're doing and and how we can do it better. And we've done it pretty good round here. We're just not doing it as good as we need to right now."
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But fixing the defense shouldn't be all on him. His role is much bigger than that, and as Nowak points out, it's time for Allen to show he's an NFL head coach and not just one of its premier defensive minds. He needs to focus on doing that right now, above everything else.
"If you hand off the play-calling to Ryan Nielsen and focus on doing [the HC] job, then we can at least get an idea," Nowak said. "Because I don't think that what you're seeing right now is a very well-coached football team."
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