Greg Auman
NFC South Reporter
The start of NFL training camps is on the horizon, so we’re doing a lap through the NFC South, identifying five lingering questions for each team.
We’ll start with the Saints, who went 9-8 last year, finishing with the same record as the division champion Bucs but losing out on a tiebreaker. New Orleans was frustratingly close to making the playoffs, though five of its nine wins came against teams that finished with six wins or fewer.
Consider this: Five NFL teams finished in the top 10 last year in scoring offense and scoring defense. Four of them — Dallas, San Francisco, Baltimore and Buffalo — won their divisions, and the other was New Orleans, which didn’t make the playoffs. It’s a stat easily skewed: If the Saints score their average of 24 points in the final game instead of 48 in a rout of the Falcons, they’re around 19th on offense. But still, it points to a team that was capable of more than it achieved.
What can the Saints do in 2024? Their Vegas over-under for wins is 7.5, same as the Bucs, two fewer than the favored Falcons. Seven wins is a rather arbitrary line, but if the Saints fail to get there, it would be the first time since 2005. Only the Steelers (2003) have a longer streak with at least seven wins every year. That “worst record since xxxx” graphic is never a good thing to see, but it speaks to how much is on the line for Dennis Allen and his staff in the season ahead.
We’ve written about the uncertainty of the offensive line, and the defense will lean heavily on a pair of 35-year-olds in linebacker Demario Davis and edge rusher Cam Jordan. We’ll write plenty about quarterback Derek Carr and whether this year is closer to his outstanding final five games of 2023, or his relative struggles before that. But here are five pivotal questions left to be answered in the season ahead:
Is this Alvin Kamara‘s final season in New Orleans?
Kamara will turn 29 as training…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/saints-training-camp-preview-cap-strapped-team-faces-pivotal-2024-season
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Publish date : 2024-07-11 16:01:07
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