Saints fire head coach Dennis Allen: Why New Orleans’ post-Sean Payton hire was always destined to backfire

The New Orleans Saints parted ways with head coach Dennis Allen after two-plus seasons on the job, including a rough 2-7 start in 2024. Allen’s team began this season with back-to-back blowout wins over the Panthers and Cowboys, but has since lost seven straight, with four of those losses coming by double digits and one coming at the hands of that same Panthers team.

The losses dropped Allen’s record with New Orleans to just 18-25, and his overall record as a head coach to 26-53, including his disastrous stretch with the then-Oakland Raiders that ended a decade ago. The Saints have looked so bad in recent weeks that this firing almost had to happen. The effort the team was putting on the field was, frankly, unacceptable. That feeling extended to ownership.

“Dennis has been part of our organization for many years. He is highly regarded within the NFL. He has been extremely loyal and professional and most importantly an excellent football coach for us. All of this makmes today very tough for me and our ogranization,” Saints owner Gayle Benson said in a statement. “However, this decision is something that I felt we needed to make at this time. I wish nothing but the best in the future for Dennis and his family. He will always be considered in the highest regard by me and everyone within our organization.”

Crucially, the results on Allen’s side of the ball (defense) have been in decline since he was elevated to the head-coaching role, after the Saints had been showing major improvement through his years as the team’s defensive coordinator:

Add in the fact that Allen wasn’t bringing much to the table in terms of game management and that multiple players were seemingly not playing up to their previous standards, and it was sort of obvious that this was coming at some point.

It’s also a reminder that Allen was elevated into the role in essentially uncontested fashion after Sean Payton retired. Payton abdicated his position on Jan. 25, 2022, and Allen was named the head coach by Feb. 8. The organization wanted the continuity of having someone on Payton’s staff take over the role. Allen even kept in place just about all of Payton’s assistants at the time. And things just got progressively worse the further removed the Saints got from Payton’s reign. 

In fairness to Allen, he was not exactly put in position to succeed. The Saints have the worst salary-cap situation in the NFL, and it’s not even close. They have basically had to keep aging, declining players around beyond their expiration dates because they couldn’t afford to accelerate cap hits and still field a 53-man roster. And despite this, they went out and spent a bunch of money to bring in Derek Carr to play quarterback, because they for some reason felt that they were merely competent quarterback play away from true contention — which was transparently not the case. 

Whomever eventually replaces Allen on a full-time basis will inherit a bad situation, and be similarly set up to fall short of expectations. The Saints are in a very bad place, and they have no way out but to take the hit for a few years and eventually start over. Whether or not that was really Allen’s fault in the first place, it had at least become clear that he wasn’t the one to turn things around.