After a week filled with offensive coaching hires, the Saints have now moved onto the defense.
The Saints landed on Brandon Staley as their new defensive coordinator for head coach Kellen Moore's staff, and they'll bring in long-time college assistant and New Orleans native Terry Joseph as their new defensive pass game coordinator, according to reports.
Joseph is an alum and former coach at Archbishop Shaw high school and was actually a star baseball player at Northwestern State, playing four seasons in the Chicago Cubs organization before transitioning into the football coaching sphere. Joseph, the cousin of current Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, began as a graduate assistant at LSU in 2006 and has had coaching stints with Louisiana Tech, Tennessee, Nebraska, Texas A&M, North Carolina, Notre Dame and most recently Texas as the defensive pass game coordinator and secondary coach.
Joseph has a long history of development at the college ranks, most recently coaching 2024 Jim Thorpe award winner Jahdae Barron and contributing to a Texas staff that's reached the College Football Playoff semifinals each of the past two seasons.
The Saints also hired Kyle Wilbur as assistant special teams coach, according to a report from NOLA.com, who will work with newly elevated Phil Galiano at special teams coordinator. Wilbur is a former NFL linebacker who was a teammate of Kellen Moore from 2015-'17 as a member of the Dallas Cowboys.
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The new Saints defensive staff will likely be under a bit of a microscope this season as it appears the new scheme will be a transition to a hybrid 3-4 style, based on Staley's history, which would mean significant role changes for a defense that's spent more than a decade running a 4-3 scheme.
New players to fit that scheme will likely be sought after in the 2025 draft, in which the Saints currently have nine selections, and the process to identify those players will continue this week at the annual NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. The Saints will also likely continue to build out their defensive staff, with openings at linebackers coach and defensive line coach, among others.