You have to give him a full season to build his off-season/in-season program. There was only so much he could improve on working within the constraints of Allen's program.
They couldn't scrap everything they were doing mid-season.
Agreed. But there are still some things you'd expect to improve on if he were an upper-level HC that didn't. Let's say we could clone a 2005 Payton, before he got to the Saints. If the Saints made Clone-Payton the interim HC instead of Rizzi, would they still have finished with a 3-5 record? I think not.
That should be the standard. If you want pretty good, just get McCarthy.