By Ross Jackson
The excitement of the 2025 NFL season is growing and growing. As each day passes, the New Orleans Saints get closer to being on the field for training camp, giving a glimpse of their new look and in particular the team’s new offense.
We’ve highlighted some of the biggest changes we expect based on new head coach Kellen Moore’s play calling history.
- RPOs
- Play Action
- Protection
- Why the system is player friendly
- Target distribution
- Yards After Catch
- Penalties
- Personnel groupings
This time, we’re digging in a little bit deeper on that last point: personnel groupings. Particularly, we’ll look at the 12-personnel, which includes two tight ends and one running back. The classically run-heavy grouping was a big time passing focus and overall focus in the Saints’ 2024 season.
Looking at Kellen Moore’s play calling career thus far, that is likely going to change in 2025. It’s reasonable to expect Moore to continue utilizing the personnel grouping, but in a much different way.
The Saints and Eagles ran 12-personnel at almost exactly the same rate in 2024 relative to percentage of snaps:
Saints: 30.3% – No. 7
Eagles: 29.9% – No. 8
The raw numbers actually had Philadelphia outpacing the Saints 333 to 313 such snaps.
The major difference, however, between the two? Run/pass split.
While the Eagles attempted only 90 passes from this two tight end set, the Saints more than doubled those attempts with 188 in 2024.
Meanwhile, the Eagles massively outran the Saints on the ground from this look. The Eagles led the league in 12-personnel rushes with 233. The Saints had just 119.
So while New Orleans and Philadelphia matched up well in terms of frequency, the usage was much, much different. Expect New Orleans to still deploy these sets, but to be much more likely to run out of it than pass like they did last year.
