The New Orleans Saints knew exactly what they were getting on Sunday with the Minnesota Vikings coming to town. The footprint was already there, whirling across the screen like a severe-weather forecast in 4K Ultra HD. The NFL’s top defense rolling in from the north, carrying a 100% chance of a torrential blitz.

Vikings’ defensive coordinator Brian Flores doesn’t pretend to be anything other than himself. And why would he? His defense has now carried the Vikings—a team that just went two full games without an offensive touchdown—to a 5-0 record. If you asked me to put a name to their identity—the overarching philosophy of Flores’ unit—I would simply say: uncertainty with intent.

If you asked me to do the same for the Saints and head coach Kellen Moore’s offense, I’d offer two words:

You first.

The truth is I don’t know the answer to that question. I suspect many fans, analysts, and even some of the players don’t either. While the Vikings’ defense has relied on creative pressures to dictate pace and limit their opponents’ options, the Saints’ offense has been defined by slow starts, anemic first quarters, and predictable, siloed play-calling.

I suppose you’d call that uncertainty without intent.

Coming off their 23-13 loss to the Vikings on Sunday, the Saints are now 1-4, and the frustration in New Orleans has reached a fever pitch. You can almost feel it spreading—the pessimism, the anger—like a slow-growing parasite beneath the turf at 5800 Airline Drive, leeching away our hopes and playoff dreams. A sentiment that was publicly echoed yesterday by team owner Gayle Benson:

As an owner, the responsibility does start with me. I will not make excuses, and I will not accept this level of performance as our standard. I am committed to making the decisions necessary to improve this team. Everyone in this organization understands the urgency.

Quite an unexpected statement from an owner who isn’t known for leveling public scrutiny. And while I’m not interested in joining the rising weekly chorus of demands for every carbon lifeform within 100 feet of the practice field to be fired, I do believe, as I said in my last article, that the time for accountability has passed. Given Mrs. Benson’s statement, I’d say we’re now squarely in the answer phase of the season—also known as the FO portion of the FAFO timeline—and if Kellen Moore, his players, or even GM Mickey Loomis cannot provide adequate answers, then it’s on the lady up top to find someone who can.

Where It All Went Wrong

The maddening reality of the Saints is that this team has real potential. Explosive talent on offense, rising young players on defense. A QB in Tyler Shough who has already demonstrated elite talent and toughness despite facing some of the harshest circumstances of any signal-caller this season. He has been among the most-blitzed quarterbacks in football, and yet he still ranks near the top of the league in passing production; with him under center, the offense has been genuinely efficient at times.

But stretches of production don’t equal consistency, and a few well-designed calls can’t establish an offensive identity. Outside the first three quarters of the Raiders game—where Kellen Moore sequenced an effective mix of the run game with play-action, quick game, and dropback passing concepts, while using tempo as a weapon rather than a crutch—offensive coherence has been tough to come by.

The league appears to have noticed too. Opponents continue to attack Shough and the Saints’ protection with aggressive pressure presentations, and over Kellen Moore’s 22 games as head coach, the offense has failed to consistently deter them with standard answers such as screens, play-action, and gap-scheme runs. And when those answers do come, they tend to be paper-thin and late-on-arrival.

It’s not that there aren’t enough plays on the menu; it’s that they lack a clear philosophical underpinning. So the offense cobbles together a collection of calls without any real connective tissue, shifting between them like an unsupervised child at an all-you-can-eat buffet, rushing from the prime rib counter to the dessert station to guzzle soft-serve straight from the dispenser. The end result is a kid who is sick, miserable, and in urgent need of discipline.

Because identity isn’t simply about having answers of your own. It’s about the conflicts you force your opponent to account for.

Forcing the Issue

When discussing identity—whether among fans or within the punditsphere—the conversation is often reduced to scheme. Are you a wide-zone team? A gap-scheme team? A vertical play-action team? Do you want to live in 11 personnel or 12? Are you pass to set up the run or run to set up the pass?

Does your head coach wear a baseball cap or a visor?

And while scheme certainly belongs in the kitchen, it is not the full pot of gumbo; it’s simply the roux. If you really want to know a team’s identity, just take a look at their priorities. What were the day-one installs? What do they emphasize during game week? Where does the offense or defense turn when shit gets weird?

These are all artifacts, evidence—the downstream sediment of a team’s core identity, with everything flowing out from a deep river of plays. NFL practice weeks are too short to be imprecise; a coach cannot pull randomly from his thousand-page playbook just because there’s a concept on page 639 that would be perfect for this particular 3rd-down nickel look.

This is where the connective tissue comes in, and sequencing becomes something concrete rather than a buzzword. As I said, your gameweek installs shouldn’t be a steady rotation of novel plays, but rather an intentional selection of core and core-adjacent concepts based on scouting and self-scouting. An inspired chef’s selection, dressed up in a marinade of motions and formations, with each play designed to weaponize a tendency and elicit a specific defensive reaction, which sets up the next call, which then forces an overcorrection and opens them up to the sleight of hand, the counter-punch. The shot play you’ve been repping all week. The one you know deep down in your very soul is going to put points on the board.

That’s sequencing. A deliberate chain of calls and execution that dictates pace and forces the defense to operate on your terms. To solve the problems you’ve created for them.

Think back to Sunday and what the Vikings’ defense did to the Saints, blitzing Shough on ten of his eleven first-half dropbacks before scaling it back in the second half, cutting their blitz rate by 60%. Rather than just blitzing over and over because “that’s what Brian Flores does,” he used the first half to establish an aggressive presentation, triggering a reaction from the Saints—more max pro, less play-action, more shotgun and obvious dropback—only to come back in the second half and weaponize that very reaction.

And Kellen Moore never punished him for it. Never forced Flores to find meaningful answers of his own.

Because one unit had its identity. The other didn’t.

The Countdown

As I mentioned earlier, Tyler Shough has been among the most-blitzed quarterbacks in the league. This isn’t a skewed number—some misleading stat accrued through one or two particular teams going blitz-happy that week. This has been a consistent trend, distributed relatively evenly through five games. Over the last two weeks alone, he’s been pressured on roughly half of his dropbacks, with defenders in his face, landing hits, forcing him off his spot and speeding up his process; Shough rarely gets a play where he’s comfortably unmolested.

Fans and talking heads have cursed the offensive line for this travesty. How DARE THEY let their QB take such a beating! How can any one of them call himself a man! But there is some simple math at play here, an equation lost to heated emotions and the blur of bodies, where the only picture that sticks is that of our franchise-hopeful QB hitting the turf again and again while those tasked with protecting him seem to be standing around, looking defeated. And that equation is this:

Five OL cannot block six defenders—and they can’t always cleanly account for five, either. As we’ve seen week in and week out, teams are scheming overloads, pick pressures, and late bandits to bring heat from outside the count. Shough’s fate is often determined by numbers and presentation. Blaming the offensive line, in this instance, for not shutting down a six- and seven-man blitz is like blaming your shoes for not keeping your head dry.

As a head coach and an offensive play-caller—and, in this case, a former QB himself—you’d expect Moore to take this personally. And yet he’s failed to establish any deterrent to this weekly massacre—designed screens to slow the rush, power and counter to wash the loaded LOS and create an extra gap, play-action on early downs to force hesitation. Much like the slow starts, the blitzes continue without meaningful consequence. The cost isn’t high enough. The risk still doesn’t outweigh the reward.

And while I haven’t really touched on the Saints’ defense, there is plenty to address over there, too. The loss of Kaeden Ellis has been unexpectedly consequential, taking one of DC Brandon Staley’s chief chess pieces off the board. More concerning has been the porous performance on early downs, which has kept the unit in a near-constant state of third-and-shorts and regularly extended drives into double-digit play counts, wearing the players down and bleeding precious time off the clock. During the third quarter of the Vikings game, the Saints’ offense was on the field for a total of four minutes and thirty-five seconds. And while Jonas Sanker’s fumble return for a touchdown certainly played a part, the defense’s inability to get off the field on either side of that turnover is the real story.

An offense that struggles to stay on the field. A defense that struggles to get off it. A special teams unit that, for good measure, put the ball on the ground to open the second half and handed Minnesota a short field for its first touchdown of the game.

This is the sort of inverse-complementary-football hell that dooms a season if its course isn’t corrected.

The Decision Myth

This is where the conversation stops being about Kellen Moore the play-caller and turns to Kellen Moore the head coach.

There’s this myth in football that every winning coach, every championship coach, is both a tactical genius and a steely-eyed cowboy who can make heroic decisions under extreme pressure. He’s bold, unflinching, and somehow always right, able to bend the game to his will and bounce the ball in his favor.

That’s bullshit.

As a head coach with over fifteen years under my belt, I’ll be the first to tell you that the job, especially in those critical situations, is less about being correct than it is about being decisive. That doesn’t diminish preparation; great preparation brings more of the game under your control and gives your decisions some solid ground to stand on.

But that’s not the side of the game I’m talking about right now. Because the conversation regarding decisions—that’s about leadership. That’s about having your team so bought in that you, as the head coach, don’t have to worry about making the right decision because you know your players will make you right.

But neither can happen without a clearly established identity. How can you lead decisively if you don’t have a sturdy pillar to lean on? How can your players make you right if they still don’t know where to hang their hat or what this team does best?

At some point, this becomes a head coach's most important job. NFL margins are hair-thin, and any team can start 1-4 if the ball doesn’t bounce their way. But the ones that turn it around—those are the teams who know who they are. Those are the teams led by coaches who don’t flinch in the face of critical decisions. Not because they know they’re right, but because they know that on this play, in this situation, nobody can top them; they’ve emphasized it since training camp and reinforced it every day in practice. Their guys are all bought in, and they’ll dive into hell to make their coach right.

But everything has an expiration date. The Saints now find themselves in a battle against inertia, with an angry fanbase surrounding them and an owner whose patience is suddenly waning. Perhaps this is the rallying cry that the team needs to pull together and embrace the us-versus-the-world mentality. To notch yet another come-from-behind victory—not just in a game, but in a season.

Hell, maybe that’s been their identity all along, and all they needed to finally find it was the world turning against them.

Or maybe that’s just another story a 1-4 team tells itself to keep the dream alive.

I guess we’ll find out soon.