Don’t look for any immediate changes from the New Orleans Saints after their worst season in almost 20 years. General manager and executive vice president Mickey Loomis isn’t in a rush to evaluate his team and consider staff changes. When asked about his plans for the offseason, Loomis says he doesn’t have a plan yet.
“Yeah I think, well, first of all,” Loomis said during his weekly WWL radio spot with Mike Hoss, gathering his thoughts, “I would like to take a little bit of a break here and let the emotions of this season dissipate, so we can view it from a lens that is a step back. We’ll kind of step back this week and then get into those evaluations that you’re talking about next week, and eventually formulate our plans for this offseason.”
Sure, there’s something to be said for a patient approach. Decisions made in the heat of the moment can come back to bite you. And many job candidates on playoff teams aren’t even able to interview for open positions for another week or two, much less be hired and introduced. But sitting on your hands in these circumstances doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. It’s clear that, for example, massive overhaul is needed for the Saints offense — they just scored their fewest points in a single season (330) since 1995, and that’s with the benefits of a 17-game schedule. Offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr. was a bust in his turn as a play caller.
So it’s really discouraging to see Loomis kicking his feet up for a week after a lost season that he built. He took the bait when the Eagles came calling about an ill-advised 2022 draft trade, giving up a 2023 first round pick that’s slotted at 10th overall in exchange for Trevor Penning, a player whose rookie season began and ended with foot injuries. He botched the search for Sean Payton’s successor at head coach and hitched their fortunes to a couple of washouts at quarterback. Now they’re back where they started with fewer means of cleaning up this mess.
And it doesn’t sound like any accountability is coming. When asked who will evaluate his performance as general manager, Loomis replied: “I don’t know, Mrs. Benson, I guess? That’s happening constantly, during the course of the year I’m visiting with Mrs. Benson daily, so that really happens every day during the entire season, the entire year, really. It’s not a formal sit-down-and-give-you-a-review that you might have with some other companies, so it’s really a little different.”
We shouldn’t anticipate any big changes on top of the organization. Loomis is the league’s longest-tenured general manager and Benson has spoken often about how integral he has been to the team’s success. But it’s really difficult to not read this situation as, well, sort of aimless. There’s no sense of urgency being expressed after a season that was filled with secondhand embarrassment. Hopefully the Saints show some initiative soon before this situation snowballs.
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