The Saints took an offensive tackle in the first round of the draft for the third time in the last four years when they selected Kelvin Banks with the ninth overall pick in April, so someone is going to be shifting positions in order for all three players to get on the field at the same time.
The team’s choice was to move 2022 first-rounder Trevor Penning to left guard with Banks next to him and 2024 first-round pick Taliese Fuaga taking over at right tackle. On Thursday, Saints head coach Kellen Moore said that Penning’s move has gone well so far.
“He’s doing an excellent job and he’s embracing it. . . . We feel like guard presents him a great opportunity,” Moore said, via John Hendrix of NewOrleans.Football.
The Saints did not pick up Penning’s contract option for the 2026 season, so the move to guard will likely be the key to a future in New Orleans and a strong year should lead to a healthy market for his services elsewhere as well.
There has been a development in New Orleans’ quarterback competition.
Jake Haener is likely to be sidelined for the rest of the offseason program by an oblique strain, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
Part of the three-way competition that also includes Spencer Rattler and rookie Tyler Shough, Haener suffered the injury after Wednesday’s OTA practice while throwing extra passes. An MRI revealed that Haener had a strain but did not suffer a tear, which means he does not need surgery.
He is expected to miss a couple of weeks, but should be ready for the start of training camp.
A fourth-round pick in the 2023 draft, Haener appeared in eight games with one start last season. He completed 18-of-39 passes for 226 yards with a touchdown and an interception.
Colts coach Shane Steichen and Cardinals coach Jonathan Gannon parlayed the Eagles’ tush-push-fueled Super Bowl run into their current gigs. Their teams nevertheless voted in favor of banning the play.
Indianapolis and Arizona were among the 22 teams that voted to prohibit all pushing of the runner.
Steichen previously was Philly’s offensive coordinator, and Gannon was the defensive coordinator. Both left after the 2022 season.
In March, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni addressed (with a grin) the positions he expected Steichen, Gannon, and Saints coach Kellen Moore (the Eagles’ offensive coordinator in 2024) to take.
“Gannon, Steichen, and Moore better vote for it,” Sirianni said. “They are in the position right now because of that play. So all three, I better have those three votes right there and the Eagles’ vote. I at least know we have four.”
Moore and the Saints opposed the proposal.
Obviously, Steichen and Gannon didn’t have the final say regarding their teams’ positions. It’ll be for them to explain to Sirianni why they weren’t able to make a difference.
By next year, when the league potentially takes another run at killing the play, the Eagles may have placed one or two more coordinators in head-coaching jobs — if the Eagles fly again to a Super Bowl, and if offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo and defensive coordinator Vic Fangio get opportunities.
There has now been reporting on all the teams that declined to vote to ban the notorious tush push.
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the Browns, Jaguars, Dolphins, Saints, and Titans voted with the Eagles, Ravens, Patriots, Jets, and Lions against the proposal that would have banned the play.
Of those 10 teams, the Saints are particularly notable as they employ former Philadelphia offensive coordinator Kellen Moore as their new head coach, and Moore called that play plenty of times en route to a Super Bowl victory last season.
Cleveland, Jacksonville, Miami, and Tennessee do not have the same direct connections to Philadelphia, though Browns G.M. Andrew Berry did work in Philadelphia’s front office and his twin brother, Adam, is the Eagles’ VP of football operations and strategy.
Notably, the Cardinals and Colts — who also have former Eagles coordinators as head coaches — did vote to ban the play.
Either way, the tush push will be in use for at least another season.
Saints coach Kellen Moore says his team will have an open competition to determine its starting quarterback. But the betting odds suggest that rookie Tyler Shough enters that competition as a heavy favorite.
Shough is the favorite at multiple sports books taking bets on the quarterback who will take the first snap of the season in Week One. Shough’s odds are at about -300 at various sports books. Spencer Rattler is considered Shough’s closest competition with odds around +200, and Jake Haener is an extreme long shot at +3000.
Derek Carr’s retirement left the Saints with the NFL’s most inexperienced quarterback room,, but the 25-year-old Shough probably enters the league more prepared to start than most rookies. He had a long college career with three years at Oregon, three years at Texas Tech and one year at Louisville, and when the Saints drafted him they knew Carr’s shoulder injury was serious enough that they might need Shough to play immediately.
Rattler was a 2024 fifth-round draft pick who started six games as a rookie last year when Carr was injured. Haener was a 2023 fourth-round pick who started one game with Carr out last year. The Saints went 0-7 in games started by Rattler and Haener.
Shough will have to prove himself in offseason work, training camp and the preseason, but if he looks like he’s making progress, Moore is likely to let the rookie take his lumps and see if Shough has what it takes to develop into a franchise quarterback the Saints can build around.
Miami has reached out to another veteran cornerback.
Per Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald, the Dolphins called to inquire about cornerback Asante Samuel Jr.
Samuel is still recovering from neck surgery and has not received an offer from Miami. He also has not been in for a visit.
But according to Jackson, the Dolphins have made it known that they’re interested and want to remain in touch as Samuel continues his recovery. If a deal comes together between the two parties, it would likely happen in July.
Samuel also had a recent reported visit with the Saints.
A Chargers second-round pick in 2021, Samuel has recorded 37 passes defensed with six interceptions in his 50 career games. He was limited to four contests in 2024.
The Dolphins also have been in touch with free-agent corner Rasul Douglas as they continue to work on trading cornerback Jalen Ramsey.
Six NFL starts isn’t much experience for a quarterback, but it gives Spencer Rattler the most of any player competing for that job in New Orleans this offseason
Derek Carr’s injuries gave Rattler a chance to play in his rookie season and Carr’s retirement left the second-year player as the most experienced signal caller for the Saints. On Monday, Rattler said he thinks that experience “helps a lot” as he prepares to compete for the starting job with Jake Haener, second-round pick Tyler Shough, and undrafted rookie Hunter Dekkers.
Rattler was 130-of-228 for 1,317 yards, four touchdowns, and five interceptions in his 2024 appearances and he’s hoping that his previous time in the lineup helps him keep an even keel while making his case for the job in the coming weeks and months.
“You can’t put too much pressure on yourself,” Rattler said, via the team. “It’s Year Two. Great opportunity ahead of me. I’ve just got to keep working, keep my head down and give it what I’ve got.”
The Saints drafted Shough before Carr announced his retirement, but Rattler said it wasn’t surprising because of the uncertainty created by Carr’s right shoulder injury. The team is resisting any calls to bring in a more seasoned quarterback at this point, so Rattler will have his chance to show that he deserves a longer run with the first team.
It’s been almost two weeks since Derek Carr announced his retirement and the Saints’ search for their next quarterback continues to be a topic of interest in their offseason workouts.
The team has moved into the third phase of those workouts and they are doing on-field work, which head coach Kellen Moore called a “nice little step” for Spencer Rattler, Jake Haener, Tyler Shough, and Hunter Dekkers. Moore cautioned that it will still be “a lot on the process and less on the results as we go through this phase” because the team won’t be holding full practices until training camp, but added that it will be good to see the team go from the classroom to the field.
Moore was asked about the possibility of bringing in a more experienced quarterback and said “we’ll give these guys a bunch of opportunities” before making any calls about outside help.
“Certainly there’s times where if the opportunity presents itself, you feel like it’s a really good fit, you’d love to do it,” Moore said, via the team. “We feel like we have some good guys here that can certainly mentor each other at the same time going through this process. . . . We’ll see how this whole thing progresses. The roster is a moving dynamic thing throughout the offseason process.”
Moore said having offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier, quarterbacks coach Scott Tolzien, and senior offensive assistant Scott Linehan on the staff with him makes him more comfortable with a relatively inexperienced quarterback room, but there’s ample time for the Saints to switch gears if they don’t think the current quartet can handle the job.
Derek Carr retired from the NFL last week but apparently not before he looked for an exit out of New Orleans to continue his career.
Katherine Terrell and Jeremy Fowler of ESPN report that a Carr “representative” spoke to at least two teams about potential interest in the veteran quarterback. The “indirect” contact let those front offices know Carr was open to playing for a new team.
ESPN reports that the Saints did not provide Carr with permission to speak with other teams, as required by NFL rules.
But the conversations never went anywhere — with Carr’s $30 million guaranteed salary and $10 million roster bonus not helping his attractiveness — and a torn right labrum and “significant degenerative changes to his rotator cuff” prompted Carr to call it quits.
The Saints likely weren’t heartbroken over Carr’s decision, with Carr and the new staff lacking a relationship. New coach Kellen Moore was sending mixed signals about having Carr as the team’s starter in 2025 and, in fact, he never even met the quarterback in person, per ESPN.
Carr now is taking time with his family, having avoided surgery, and the Saints are moving on with second-round pick Tyler Shough among those competing for the starting job.
Once upon a time, every team played at least once in prime time. More recently, every team played one — and only one — Thursday game after playing on Sunday.
While it forced fans to hold their noses and watch (or not watch) games like Titans-Jaguars on a Thursday night in December, it created some degree of equity and balance when it came to the demands placed on the various teams.
In recent years, that’s gone out the window. And for good reason. Better prime-time games featuring more attractive teams lead to bigger audiences. Bigger audiences allow broadcast partners to justify the massive rights fees they pay — and it seeds the soil for even larger rights fees the next time packages are available for bidding.
The new approach, with certain teams being overloaded by prime-time and other standalone games and multiple teams (this year, the Browns, Titans, and Saints) being treated like Michael Scott’s neon beer sign, creates a competitive imbalance.
“Certainly the better teams probably end up finding themselves more widely represented in the television windows, and therefore get out of the routine,” NFL V.P, of broadcast planning and scheduling Mike North said during a Thursday conference all with reporters. “The Chiefs, for instance, have been playing five, six, seven prime-time games, playing seemingly every day of the week. It doesn’t seem to have hurt them. So, yeah, that’s what comes with success.
North attributed the dynamic to a “constant balancing act” of “trying to figure out [how to] feed the fans, feed our broadcast partners with the games and the teams they want to see.” He said there’s “always . . . an eye towards competitive inequities, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt to the Chiefs.”
But the selection of prime-time games isn’t only about imposing on the teams that have been good. The process entails making a guess as to whether a team will be good, or at least interesting, regardless of whether the team has a history of playing well enough to deserve the burden.
Last year, for example, the Jets had seven standalone games in the first 11 weeks, including two Sunday-Thursday short weeks. The Jets got the chronically short straw, even though they haven’t been to the playoffs since 2010. At the time, North justified giving the Jets the scheduling business by explaining that the Jets “kind of owe us one” after Aaron Rodgers’s Week 1 season-ending Achilles tear made their 2023 prime-time games far less attractive.
In 2024, Rodgers started every game during the gauntlet, and beyond. And the Jets went 5-12.
This year, the Cowboys have six prime-time games (and a record four Thursday games) despite not making the playoffs in 2024 and, given their schedule, unlikely to do so in 2025. Likewise, a pair of non-playoff teams who aren’t currently regarded as short-list contenders — the Dolphins and Falcons — have been tabbed for FIVE prime-time games each. (Both teams also have an early-morning standalone European game.)
The league apparently is making a bet that Miami and Atlanta will be good. Having six standalone games could help make that a self-defeating prophecy.
The league also expects that the Titans, Browns, and Saints will be not too good. And it will be not bad for them to have the routine and normalcy that comes from playing most of their games at 1:00 p.m. ET on Sundays. (The Browns will play a standalone game in London.)
Two years ago, the Texans played 16 games at 1:00 p.m. ET, before landing on Saturday night for the de facto AFC South championship game against the Colts. Houston parlayed their low profile into a very unexpected playoff berth.
This year, don’t be surprised if the Titans make a run at the same accomplishment. Overlooked and disregarded (just like No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward was during the draft), the Titans can quietly go about their business, stack wins, and get themselves into postseason contention.
And then pay they’ll pay the piper with plenty of prime-time games in 2026. It’ll be better to do it that way, than to play well enough to not make the playoffs, but to catch the league’s eye when it’s time to make out next year’s schedule.
