There’s no easy way to say this: Back-to-back blowout losses should spike Darren Rizzi’s candidacy to be the next head coach of the New Orleans Saints. His team just hasn’t looked prepared down the stretch.
A week after getting shut out and outscored 34-0, Rizzi’s team returned home and caught a three-win Las Vegas Raiders squad dealing with short rest after mechanical issues derailed their flight plans the night before. And their only touchdown of the afternoon came off a trick play, in a 25-10 loss. Even with all of the injuries hammering their depth chart, that’s unacceptable given the talent remaining and the plays we’ve seen them make in other games this year.
But this is just one piece of a larger puzzle. When Dennis Allen was fired, Rizzi took over as the interim coach with eight games left in the season, and if he’d gone 5-3 he may have had a compelling argument. Instead, he’s 3-4 with a regular season finale coming up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad that dropped 51 points on the Saints earlier this year.
It doesn’t matter if Rizzi is beloved in the building. This version of this Saints team isn’t worth keeping together. Mickey Loomis played it safe to this point and he doesn’t have any positive results to speak for. The Saints need to move on with a new coach who isn’t trying to be Sean Payton, who can bring in their own coaches and players and retool this roster.
That won’t be easy given their salary cap constraints; Derek Carr is almost certainly returning for 2025, and the team only owns four picks in the first three rounds to add high-impact prospects. But that doesn’t matter. Taking the easy way out again because Rizzi is a known quantity or a favorite of the locker room is irrelevant. He’s shown that he doesn’t have the juice. His team hasn’t won games against weak opponents or even competed with playoff contenders. It won’t hurt to interview him and see how he compares to other interested candidates, but he should by no means be a frontrunner for the job.
And that’s a shame. Rizzi seems like a very knowledgeable, experienced coach whose peers and players respect him. If he’d been more successful in this seven-game audition he’d have a stronger argument in his favor. But the results speak for themselves, and it’s vital that the Saints look outside their building — and outside Payton’s circle of influence — in finding their next head coach.
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