Saints Feel Like They Can Fix What's Broken
ATLANTA -- Were the Saints ready to play after the bye week? That's honestly a fair question, and at times it certainly didn't seem like it. There were some good things, and obviously when you lose the bad gets magnified even more.
For New Orleans, it's becoming a recurring theme of how they lose in games, and it's extremely disappointing that they aren't figuring it out and playing the team ball needed to get these winnable games. However, no matter the current circumstances, they still feel like they can get this thing, which would likely mean winning the NFC South. However, they're running out of games to do that and there's things to fix still after Week 12.
"The truth is, we're not the team that we want to be," Tyrann Mathieu said after the game. He chalked up the bad run defense to not setting the edges, having bad tackling, and not executing on how they wanted to.
"I think at times, we show great promise and hope. Like, there's good glimpses, but we just haven't put it together yet. I think that's really the most frustrating part about it. You try to get better at a lot of different things throughout the season. Obviously, six games left, we still have a place atop the division. So that's just me being optimistic, but we have to do a better job of just complementing one another. I think our complementary football is just not really good right now."
Penalties, turnovers, and the inability to stop the run was what Dennis Allen attributed to the latest loss to for his squad. The Falcons won the line of scrimmage today with relative ease with their ground attack. Allen was asked during his postgame press conference if he's sees any commonalities with the inconsistency in the red zone being 12 games into the season.
Allen said, "I think one of the things is when you get down there and all of the sudden you go from 1st-and-10, a positive gain, and now it's 1st-and-20, that puts you behind the sticks. It makes it more challenging. I think that's one area that's been a problem is the penalties. I mean it's 1st-and-20. I thought that was a big factor today cause on a couple of those plays, I thought we were going to be in pretty good field position and pretty good down and distance situation. So, I think penalties are probably a big factor."
Allen believes the red zone issues can be fixed, saying that he thinks the team is improving but just wasn't good enough today. Two penalties and two turnovers will certainly do that to you, but at some point, those have to lead to touchdowns and not field goals. There's yards, but points are being left off the board. However, Allen maintains that the team didn't take a step back after the bye week and that he saw some good things out on the field.
"We're going to keep working until we get it fixed," Allen said on getting things right despite having just a little over a month left in the season. And that's the message to his team, go back to work and work to be better next week when they play the Lions.
"We're all in this thing together," Derek Carr said after the game. "We are going to work like crazy to make it right. We really are. We're going to give it our best. It hasn't happened at the same time yet, but if and when it does, it's going to be a beautiful thing."
Carr said the players are frustrated just like everyone else, but they're not going to stop working to achieve the end result. However, he said that he's seen when a team has battled and gone through a lot of things, but still made the playoffs. What did that was everyone coming together.
"I believe this in everything in me that we still have time left. Time may be running out, but we still have time left. I'm going to look at it that way."
Alvin Kamara, who is a very strong gauge of where the team is at, just feels like the team just has to do it and stop talking.
"I just feel like there's too much talking, talking about what we 'need' to look like. We need to find a real fix, not just 'Oh we gotta be better.' You want to get better every week. That's obvious. Let's get past that. How are we going to get better?"
Kamara also said, "We don't have an identity as a team. We're a team that says we want to do it and we don't do it and It shows. Consistently inconsistent. ... Everybody with a Fleur-de -Lis on their body and on their head. Consistently inconsistent. I'm saying as a team."
The Saints have a three-game home stand, and they play a Lions team who will be hungry and well-rested after their Thanksgiving loss to the Packers. For the glass half-full crowd, the NFC South is still within reach. For the glass half-empty crowd, there's six more games to go. One way or another, it's going to be an interesting time in New Orleans.
