Patience has officially worn out in New Orleans. After yet another embarrassing performance from the defense on Sunday, when the Saints allowed 47 points to the Redskins, defensive coordinator Rob Ryan was fired on Monday night.
By any metric, the Saints have been abysmal defensively for the second consecutive season. Having allowed 130 points over the last three games, New Orleans has now given up to 315 points this season; that's more than eight teams allowed across the entire 2014 campaign, and the Saints still have six games left to go.
The Saints rank as one of the 25 worst defenses through 10 games in league history in terms of points allowed, and while scoring is higher in 2015 than it has been in years past, they are part of the reason why. They have allowed teams to score at a rate 2.2 standard deviations higher than the league average, which would put them right around 25th over a full season. They were last in DVOA and last in FPI going into Week 10, and because of their defensive woes, the Saints are last in the NFC South.
So the defense is bad. The question is why the Saints have fallen so far. Could they have foreseen this disaster? And does firing Ryan solve any of their problems? I've calibrated the custom-made Excuse-o-meter to try to figure out what's gone wrong.
Here are the results.
37.09 percent: Rob Ryan might not be a very good defensive coordinator
When he's been available before, it's almost reflexive to assume Ryan is a good defensive coordinator. There's cachet in the last name; his father (Buddy) and brother (Rex) are two of the best defensive minds of their respective generations, so there's little reason to think that the apple fell far from the tree. Ryan also is certainly one of the more conspicuous coaches on sidelines every Sunday, a certifiable go-to guy for reaction shots. Think about how many defensive coordinators you could identify on sight. Rob Ryan is one of the precious few, so he must be good, right?
I've been one of those folks giving Ryan the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but skepticism is overdue. This is Ryan's fourth gig as a defensive coordinator, and since being hired away from Bill Belichick's staff after winning a pair of titles as New England's linebackers coach, Ryan has spent the last 12 years as a coordinator. The results speak for themselves. Ryan's defenses have been pretty bad by any measure.
Ryan's units have finished above the league average in terms of scoring defense or DVOA just three times in 12 years, and one of those was a 16th-place finish. His typical season has been 21st in points allowed. The Dolphins are 21st in points allowed right now, and they've already fired one defensive coordinator (Kevin Coyle) this season. If you're a Ryan fan, you can construct a story in each situation: The Raiders were hopeless; the Browns got rid of him as part of Eric Mangini's staff, despite the defensive improvements; and both the Cowboys and Saints scapegoated him to mask issues elsewhere around the locker room. But at some point, you can't escape your record.
Ask yourself this: If Ryan was a 6-foot, 180-pound man named Rob Jones who had his hair cut once every couple of weeks and saved his exultations for the team facility, would we be waiting for him to turn it around? Would he be on his fourth shot?
21.09 percent: Ryan's scheme might not be a great fit for the players he has
The Ryan family credo is built around one word: pressure. You had to wash the dishes and mow the lawn to collect your allowance as a kid. Rex and Rob had to draw up exotic rush packages to borrow the family car. They were born into a life of blitzes and blintzes. It's a good life.
Ryan was brought to New Orleans under the premise that he could revitalize a moribund defense by getting after the opposing QB. The Saints had one of the league's worst pass rushes during the 2012 campaign, when Gregg Williams was suspended and Ryan was in Dallas. Their 4.7 percent sack rate was the league's fourth-worst figure. A year later, with Junior Galette and Cameron Jordan emerging as the core of a developing Saints pass rush, New Orleans took down opposing quarterbacks on 8.8 percent of their dropbacks. That was the fourth-best rate in the league. Since then, however, the Saints have ranked 23rd (2014) and 18th (2015) in the same statistic; their pass rush has been mediocre at best.
What's interesting about that 2013 season for Ryan is that he didn't really need to blitz to get after the opposing quarterback. His Saints posted the league's third-best pressure rate that season (28.3 percent), but they only blitzed the quarterback on 30.9 percent of opposing dropbacks, which was the 20th-most-frequent rate in the league.
Last year, as the pass rush dissipated amidst a frustrating season, Ryan sent more and more waves of players at the quarterback with diminishing returns. The Saints blitzed on 36.1 percent of dropbacks, the seventh-highest rate in the league, but only managed to return the league's 18th-best pressure rate. And this year, neither solution has worked: the Saints are 23rd in blitz rate and pressure rate alike.
Minus Ryan, one quick adjustment could be to simply blitz less, as you can see:
Granted, turning into the league's 26th-ranked pass defense isn't anything to savor, but it would represent an improvement for this group.
31.08 percent: The players Ryan has to work with might not be very good.
That's not what Saints fans want to read, but it might be true. There are a lot of question marks surrounding the personnel on the defensive side of the ball, owing to mistakes made in the draft, free agency and managing the salary cap by Saints general manager Mickey Loomis. The Saints used the offseason to try to retool their defense on the fly, trading players like Jimmy Graham, Ben Grubbs, and Kenny Stills away for extra draft picks that were designed to bring in cheap, quality defenders.
Loomis's 2015 offseason actually hasn't been all that bad on the field. First-round pick Stephone Anthony has been solid as a rookie run defender; second-rounder Hau'oli Kikaha is second on the team with four sacks, although he's currently struggling with an ankle injury. (The same can't be said for the team's highest-drafted defender from 2014, second-rounder Stanley Jean-Baptiste, who was cut in training camp after playing just eight defensive snaps as a rookie. That's a bust.)
And Loomis's free-agent acquisitions haven't been a total disaster. Former Seahawks tackle Kevin Williams has been serviceable. And CFL refugee Delvin Breaux has improved some after struggling early in the season; he's the exact sort of player the Saints desperately need -- a competent starter with a cap hit of $619,000 or less over each of the next three seasons.
But moves for Dannell Ellerbe and Kyle Wilson haven't been anywhere near as impactful as Loomis would have hoped, though, and he's still haunted by his two biggest mistakes in free agency. Last year, Loomis went all-in with the little cap space he had to sign ballhawk safety Jairus Byrd away from the Bills, structuring Byrd's deal in such a way to delay most of the payout for the years to come.
That sort of deal works out well if a player continues to stay healthy and play effectively, but neither has been the case with Byrd, who missed most of the 2014 season with a torn meniscus that lingered into the 2015 campaign.
Loomis allowed former first-rounder Patrick Robinson to leave in free agency and used what little cap space he had to solidify things at cornerback. He bizarrely capitulated to an empty, leverage-less threat from incumbent Keenan Lewis, guaranteeing the team's top corner more than $10 million over the next three seasons. The 29-year-old Lewis has subsequently suffered hip, sports hernia and leg injuries, which have limited him to just 15.6 percent of New Orleans's defensive snaps this season.
More distressing has been the play of Brandon Browner. The Saints targeted the bruising Browner as a physical defender capable of holding up in man coverage behind Ryan's blitzes. What they've gotten instead is a penalty-prone player who looks several steps slow in coverage. And penalty prone might be selling things short. Browner is lapping the league in the category. He has drawn a league-high 15 flags for 154 yards. Nobody else in football has made it over nine penalties.
10.74 percent: The Saints have been hit by injuries and unexpected absences on defense
Every defense has to deal with injuries, so the Saints can't simply just write their defensive mess off to that common cause, but you can make a case that the Saints have struggled more than most. I mentioned Lewis' absence. Elsewhere, Byrd missed a month, and he still is clearly not 100 percent; Kikaha has missed time; and Ellerbe has only been healthy enough to play 182 snaps. And depth pieces like safety Rafael Bush and cornerback P.J. Williams, the team's third-round pick, were placed on season-ending injured reserve before the season even started.
There are other issues, though, which weren't as easy to anticipate. The Saints cut nose tackle Brodrick Bunkley in camp in July when he failed his physical. More significantly, they released controversial linebacker Galette in July, months after he was linked to at least one alleged off-field assault of a woman. Galette may not have made a contribution -- he suffered a pectoral injury with the Saints in camp before subsequently tearing his Achilles after signing with Washington in August -- but his release left the Saints without their best edge rusher.
New Orleans's cap woes prevented the Saints from bringing in veteran pieces to replace the likes of Bunkley and Galette so close to the season. Instead, they've had to shop at the bottom of the market, with predictably bad results.
Some of the depth issues will improve, both over the remainder of this season and in the years to come. The Saints used enough draft capital on defense this year to at least give the players on the back of their roster meaningful experience, which will help. But cap gaffes limit flexibility in the short term.
None of that, frustratingly so for Saints fans, will be solved by firing Ryan.