By Ross Jackson
Every offseason coaching cycle comes with a moving scale of opinions in how deserving teams are of top candidates to fill their open head coach positions.
The general consensus among those evaluating the New Orleans Saints seems to be that they are a bad landing spot for a potential coach. However, the same factors that lead many to believe that could actually be a key part of the Saints’ sales pitch to their top candidates.
What’s wrong with the Saints job? Well, they currently sit with an aging roster, no solidified future at quarterback, and with a $52 million overage on the 2025 salary cap.
Each of these concerns also allows New Orleans to offer something every first-time head coach or coach seeking a fresh start desires in a new opportunity: patience.
An organization that has proven time and time again that—sometimes to a fault—it will remain patient with its coaches and decisions, the Saints’ current situation only furthers that tendency.
New head coaches don’t take jobs with a short-term view. They are looking for a place where they can create a long-term future, a place where they could build a winning culture and find sustained success.
In New Orleans, whichever coach is hired would likely receive a free season or two—unless things go dramatically wrong in a short period.
The Saints need time to dig themselves out of their cap situation, inject youth into their roster, and figure out their future at quarterback. They may have the next long-time signal caller on their roster, but neither of their young options have enough experience to know for sure. Meanwhile, starting quarterback Derek Carr is approaching his 34th birthday.
All of those ventures will turn into a multi-year endeavor.
The time should buy any coach hired the time they need to establish a culture, rebuild the roster, and potentially handpick the young quarterback of their choice—whether on the roster or as an offseason acquisition in future years.
It can be easy to be critical of a team’s current position. The reasons a team undergoes a head coaching search are rarely good, after all. But the organizational stability, patience, a strong player culture, and a multi-season rebuild that stare the Saints in the face are all things that could be enticing to a coach, even if not enticing to the analysts evaluating from the outside.
One could argue that the team’s situation is bad, but another perspective is that it’s so bad it’s almost perfect.
