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The New Orleans Saints looked like one of the surprise teams of the 2024 NFL season after Week 2. But since then, New Orleans has been in freefall and the cracks that began to show are now gaping holes.
After the Saints‘ seventh straight loss, this time to lowly NFC South division rival Carolina, star running back Alvin Kamara has seemingly seen enough.
In response to a reporter’s postgame question, Kamara said that the team had full confidence in its abilities. It does not, however, seem to have confidence in head coach Dennis Allen.
“I feel like dudes is confident,” Kamara said (2:00 mark of the above video). “I mean, there’s a lot of guys that have played a lot of football in here. You just talked about Tyrann [Mathieu], I think he’s a confident dude. I think Demario [Davis], Cam [Jordan], me, Derek [Carr], and even some of the younger dudes. Chris [Olave] and even [Mason] Tipton. We’ve got guys that are confident. Defensive, receiver. … I can keep going. We’ve got guys. I’m naming guys, you know. I think there’s confidence there. But there might not be confidence in something else, so.”
Alvin Kamara Has Valid Reasons To Doubt Dennis Allen’s Abilities As A Head Coach
While Kamara did not directly invoke Allen’s name, it’s hard to take his answer any other way. It’s also hard to blame Saints players if they have given up on Allen.
The former defensive coordinator was hand-picked to succeed Sean Payton in 2022. He went just 7-10 in his first season at the helm and 9-8 a year ago.
This year, New Orleans is 2-7, which brings Allen’s record as the team’s head coach to 18-25 over 2.5 seasons. That’s just not good enough.
And it’s not the first evidence we have that Allen isn’t a capable head coach in the NFL. From 2012-2014 he went 8-28 as the head coach of the Raiders before being fired.
In total, Allen has a dismal 26-53 record as an NFL head coach. That’s a .329 win percentage. How can you expect any self-respecting team to have confidence in that?
Update: It appears that New Orleans Saints owner Gayne Benson agreed with Kamara, as the Saints parted ways with Allen on Monday morning.
Reports out of New Orleans state that Benson met with players on Sunday night to discuss the team’s issues. She determined that Allen was one of, if not the prevailing force behind the struggles.
Gayle Benson began meeting with players last week to get a feel for what was wrong with the Saints. At the end, she and the organization decided to act.
Here’s an inside look at what went wrong and what led to Dennis Allen’s firing.https://t.co/SWC4Y5WNqG
— Nick Underhill (@nick_underhill) November 4, 2024
The Saints promoted special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi to the position of interim head coach. Rizzi has been with the organization since 2019.