Underhill article: “Saints moves are telling us what they felt the real problem with the team was last season”

DSnfla said
Ok so I'm trying to be open mined with you because we but heads all the time. How can the injury claim be lame? Every yr a good team does not live up to their potential due to injuries. Yes all teams deal with injuries but not to the level that we did last yr. You mention the Lions, their injuries did not start at the beginning of the yr like ours did they were like 6-7 -0 before it started with their D. Also their D was not the strength of their team, their O was and they had hardly any injuries
Philly beat the Rams by 17 how is that their closest game, and the Rams were getting healthy by then

I just think ( and apparently so does CKM and his staff) that injuries were a big factor for the way the team performed last yr. This mindset that injuries are downplayed at the level we had last yr and it really does not matter to be absurd. Please enlighten me

I think it's mainly bc there's no evidence suggesting that even if the team was fully healthy that'd we'd be serious contenders. Our major weaknesses are run defense, oline, and receivers. Lines had next to no injuries and were still subpar, while we're one concussion away from Shaheed being our WR1. I think we've seen the team healthy in 2023 and there's really no evidence that we'd be much better than that going into 2025. Maybe an 11 win ceiling if literally everything goes our way. Then our team would have to start playing actual teams in the playoffs, which seems grim since we've beat next to no .500 teams in the past couple years.

Additionally, it's worth saying that injuries will be a fundamental problem even heading into the season. With how old so many of our stars are, the risk of injury is going to be very high and thus we need to factor that in when realistically accessing the team.

For some of the truthers, I really would encourage as a thought exercise to rank the Saints when compared to other teams. Saints can seem like they're pretty good when viewed in isolation, but soooo many teams look so much better when in comparison. It all just seems really grim.