ORLEANS SAINT HEAD COACH Dennis Allen IS DEAD BECAUSE OF…..
It looks like Saints fans should expect more of the same come 2024. New Orleans Saints executive vice president and general manager Mickey Loomis held his annual end-of-season press conference Wednesday. Despite firing longtime offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael on Tuesday, Loomis remained steadfast in his decision to not complete the transition by firing head coach Dennis Allen.
When asked about the decision to bring back Allen, Loomis reached for a sheet of paper in his back pocket while saying the “lazy thing to do” is to assign blame to coaches and quarterbacks based on “the result of the season.” He went on to list how some of the league’s best coaches of all time began their careers.
“Look, I was prepared for this question,” Loomis said, referring to the folded-up paper. “Chuck Noll, his first three years. Hall of Fame coach. He was 1-13, 5-9, 6-8. But they recognized that this guy’s a good football coach, right? Bill Belichick. Here’s his first three seasons. 6-10, 7-9, 7-9. Tom Landry. 0-11, 4-9, 5-8, 4-10, 5-8. Hall of Fame coaches, all of them. Bill Walsh, first year 2-14. Second year 6-10.
“I think the easy thing to do is just look at the results,” Loomis continued, “and say ‘Oh, no. We gotta have a change.’ You gotta look beyond that. What are the reasons why we were 9-8 instead of 13-4? It’s collective. It’s the players, it’s the coaches, it’s me, it’s our personnel staff, our roster. It’s variables, sometimes we don’t have any control of.”
At 24-26, Allen currently has the lowest win percentage of any active head coach in the league at 34.3%. His runway is longer than all the coaches Loomis listed outside of Landry, a coach credited with inventing the 4-3 defense and “Flex Defense,” a defense so effective that he had to also invent an offensive counter to it.