Saints Need an Offensive Weapon

JackDiesel said

You want to talk about silly? You're checking your notes off of our end of year depleted WR group and acting like that's what we'll have next year.

Meanwhile I see Shaheed, MVS and if they'd dial Olave's role back to a #2 WR that might save him. All that's left is a possession WR/TE that can make contested catches.

You focus on the run, force the defense to bring down a safety and it's open season for our receivers deep. AK is no bell cow RB and we're going to be relying on that position more than any other one. Our early season success was around running the ball, that's how you protect the QB and the defense. So not only is it an extremely important part of the team but there's a good chance that the RB available will be the most talented player available.

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A lot of our early season success was based around playing two terrible run defenses. Carolina's run defense ranks 32nd by DVOA, and Dallas ranks 29th. That means pretty much every team in every situation is running all over them. Even on traditional stats, Carolina is giving up 5.1 yards per carry this season (32nd), while Dallas is giving up 4.8 (29th). We slot in at 30th with 31st with 4.9/attempt, which wasn't a problem for us in our first couple of games because the the game script didn't give our opponents much opportunity to run (Dallas also was still trotting Elliott out there to get three yards and a cloud of turf pellets).

While McCoy going down had an impact on our week 3 loss, playing against the #1 ranked run defense that week meant we weren't going to just pile up yards and TD's at will. In our next four games after the Eagles, we played three more games against top 10 run defenses. It was a perfect storm of having our best IOL injured against some of the best rush defenses in the league, which led to a quick loss of our identity.