Going into his second year as the New Orleans Saints’ head coach, Kellen Moore is stepping into a training camp that promises to be very different from his first.
Unlike his first season in 2025, the team will be walking into this year’s training camp with a foundation of what’s expected and an understanding of the team’s identity, system and operation.
There will be new faces that will be playing catch up in some cases, but offseason practices with Organized Team Activities (OTAs) and minicamps allowed for that foundation to be reset ahead of diving into camp practices the final week of July.
With that, the Saints are likely to set up a more competitive and fast-paced environment than what they were able to create last year. Without having to establish the new offensive, defensive and special teams systems and vocabulary, the team will be able to more quickly dive into competing and getting ready for the 2026 regular season.
Last year, when the team completed its installation on each side of the ball, Moore organized an entirely unscripted scrimmage day that amounted to 126 unplanned, live-called plays being run as the offense and defense sparred from first team to third.
It was an exhilarating day of practice that taught the team a lot about where it was and where it had the potential to go.
This year, more of those kinds of competitive, unscripted periods, should be on the way for New Orleans. Even if not ones that total 126 plays, there is a lot to be gleaned from this kind of work.
It begins to develop an understanding of what the team’s identity is on both sides of the ball and how that identity shifts depending on the game situation: when it can be more aggressive, how it likes to see the gameplan develop, what the go-to nature of the attack looks like in a variety of different circumstances. The team gets to learn a valuable amount of information about itself, its blemishes and its development in drills that push players and coaches out of the comforts of a practice script.
With a team that’s established its groundwork already this season, Moore’s Saints should be in line for much earlier competitive practices during their 2026 training camp.
