Cardboard boxes lined the New Orleans Saints locker room, placed one by one in front of players’ lockers with the corresponding name neatly labeled on the side.
This served as a visual reminder of what comes next for the Saints as they prepare for the 2024 season. Since the end of a disappointing 2023 season, new coaches have been hired, the front office augmented the roster through the draft and free agency, and those new players and ideas began to coalesce at minicamps and OTAs.
Then it was time to pack up, and the next time they’ll all be together will be in Southern California next month for the start of training camp.
The longest break in the NFL schedule has arrived. The Saints mostly will go dark for the next five weeks, outside of a few community events. Players and coaches will take their vacations and rest their minds and bodies for the grueling season ahead.
There is still plenty that is unknown about this New Orleans team that is facing a big season after three consecutive years without a trip to the playoffs, but the last four months or so have at least solidified some ideas about who the Saints will be this season.
Here are three thoughts about the team as it currently exists:
Entertaining offense
It is way too early to tell whether the Saints offense will actually be good under new offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak. But it is not too early to see that it will look very different compared to what the Saints used to run, and it is probably not too early to say the new-look offense will be fun to watch.
In practice, the Saints offense fed the defense steady servings of pre-snap motion, which is new; last season, New Orleans ranked 26th in the percentage of time it sent a man in motion before the snap (14.3%), according to an ESPN report.
To be clear, motion before the snap isn’t a cure-all, but most of the best offenses leaned heavily on it last year. Here is a ranking of the top eight offenses by scoring, with their ranking in pre-snap motion usage in parentheses.
- Dallas Cowboys (23)
- Miami Dolphins (1)
- San Francisco 49ers (3)
- Baltimore Ravens (6)
- Detroit Lions (5)
- Buffalo Bills (27)
- Philadelphia Eagles (32)
- Los Angeles Rams (2)
Of the six teams that used pre-snap motion most frequently last year, five finished in the top quarter of the league in scoring. The Green Bay Packers, in their first season under quarterback Jordan Love, were the lone outlier, finishing fourth in pre-snap motion but just 12th in scoring.
The way the Saints offense moved after the snap is notable as well.
The offense was sometimes hard to track from the sideline because of all the misdirection, which is one of the staples of the Kyle Shanahan offense that Kubiak brought with him.
Combine some of this stuff — the purpose of which is to muddy the picture for the defense — with some of the offensive weapons the Saints possess, and it’s easy to see this being a much more explosive offense than it has been the past few seasons.
Most of the Saints big offensive chunks have come in the vertical passing game in recent years. While that should still be there, this version should result in more opportunities for monster gains in the run game and short passing game.
The scheme looks good, but there are still a lot of questions the Saints need to answer.
Can this young offensive line take a big leap forward? Do the Saints have enough pass-catching depth behind Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed? And while everyone has been raving about him as a coach and teacher, does Kubiak have the play-calling chops?
Areas of concern
Olave and Shaheed both look like they’re on track for career years, as long as they can stay healthy. But beyond those two, it’s hard to discern who the Saints can count on.
Free agent addition Cedrick Wilson looks like a pretty safe bet to make the roster and contribute, but is he a No. 3 receiver? That’s tougher to see.
A.T. Perry has some magnificent traits — and he made a handful of wow plays during OTAs and minicamp — but the staff also clearly wants more out of him, and it’s hard to say what that “more” is without being present in the meetings. But every opportunity coach Dennis Allen has had to praise Perry, he has offered little. Perhaps that’s reading too far between the lines, but it is noticeable.
New Orleans very well could go into the season with whom it has at this position, but it also feels like a group that could use a proven veteran addition via trade or free agency.
These offseason practices have taught us two things about offensive tackle: Taliese Fuaga looks like he’s going to be the answer on the left side, which is good, and Ryan Ramczyk will almost certainly miss the 2024 season (and he could be completely finished playing football), which is not good.
Trevor Penning is getting a shot on the right side, but that still feels a bit unstable. Are the Saints comfortable with the combination of Landon Young and Oli Udoh to hold that position down in case Penning can’t perform?
Finally, while the Saints have projected confidence about their group of safeties, that group feels incomplete.
Johnathan Abram played well in two starts late last season, but he has been exposed in coverage throughout his career. The Saints also have used Jordan Howden and free agent signee Will Harris at safety.
More help on the way?
Especially the last couple of years, as they’ve navigated a tight salary-cap crunch made worse by the pandemic, the Saints have been a team that has been happy to wait out the pricey first wave of free agency to find the deals on the other side.
This year, they seemed fine waiting out the second and third waves, too. New Orleans made a handful of free agent signings, but the only one that really generated headlines was the one-year, $13 million mercenary deal Chase Young agreed to.
In fact, almost all of the Saints’ free agent signings this offseason were of the one-year variety, and most of them were for at or near the league minimum salary. Wilson (two years, $5.75 million) was the only veteran to sign a multiyear deal with New Orleans this offseason, and Young was the only signee whose contract exceeded $3 million annually.
But are the Saints done making moves?
Last week, they cashed in one of their few remaining chips to manipulate the salary cap, restructuring Taysom Hill’s contract to free more than $6 million in 2024 cap space. As of this writing, they have approximately $12 million in available cap space.
It doesn’t seem likely that the Saints would push Hill’s cap charges into the future for no reason other than to give themselves a bit more of a cushion now. This seems very clearly to be a move designed to help the team now.
There are still a handful of players with strong NFL pedigrees at positions where the Saints could use some help — receiver, tackle and safety — though many of them come with asterisks.