"I look at @Saints GM Mickey Loomis and I love his approach to this off-season.
Re-build? No. Restructure. Re-work. Reload.
The Saints are my team to watch in the NFC this year, and I appreciate the way they've done things this Spring."
– @PSchrags pic.twitter.com/q4FpmMSP1H
— Good Morning Football (@gmfb) April 5, 2023
Here’s some rare praise for the New Orleans Saints and general manager Mickey Loomis. NFL Network morning show host Peter Schrager gave the Saints a pat on the back during a Wednesday debate on which team has a brighter future ahead of them in 2023: New Orleans or the Las Vegas Raiders. The way Schrager sees it, Derek Carr was lucky to get away from his old team.
“I find the Saints really interesting also, because this could have been a good time for them to rip the band-aid off, turn the page, and say ‘Let’s go into a rebuild,'” Schrager began, “They didn’t do that. They doubled down. They went and gave Derek Carr, a veteran, a huge contract.”
Schrager recapped the many creative contract restructures and reworkings that got the Saints under the salary cap, including maneuvers with experienced starters like Cameron Jordan, Demario Davis, Tyrann Mathieu, Alvin Kamara, and Marshon Lattimore. And even, he quipped, Taysom Hill. The Saints were able to get under the cap by a margin of tens of millions of dollars while signing Carr and without cutting a single player.
He continued: “It almost feels like what the Jets are doing in a way, where we’ve got this core and we’re just a quarterback away. And that’s what the Saints view it as. I look at Mickey Loomis, who is the general manager of the New Orleans Saints, who was been there and was part of the group who hired Sean Payton way back when, back in 2004. He’s still the GM and he’s still making moves.”
Schrager misfired on that date — Loomis hired Payton in 2006 — but he is the NFL’s longest-tenured general manager, having being hired in 2002, after longtime Pittsburgh Steelers GM Kevin Colbert stepped down last year. And he was complimentary of the work Loomis and his front office have done to keep this team competitive without wasting fans’ time with a tedious rebuild.
Too many NFL analysts want to see football teams doing what baseball and basketball fans hate to see: trading away fan-favorite players to cut costs and save money on payroll while actively losing games to get in position for cheap rookies. It’s a miserable process for everyone involved, and we’re fortunate that the Saints are more interested in winning games and putting together an entertaining product than going into the tank. Hopefully these efforts pay off in the fall.
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