Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis spoke publicly for the first time since the team fired coach Dennis Allen on Monday.
Loomis called Allen a “fantastic football coach” but explained that “circumstances” created “stress and pressure” for the organization to make a move after a seven-game losing streak. The last straw was Sunday’s 23-22 loss to the previously one-win Panthers.
“Look, I think Dennis Allen is a fantastic football coach, and I think anybody in our league who would talk about him thinks he’s a fantastic football coach. He is,” Loomis said on WWL-AM on Tuesday, via Matthew Paras of nola.com. “I think in this case, look, the circumstances created the record. That’s just the truth, and a lot of people don’t want to hear it.”
Loomis said the Saints have had an “abnormal” amount of injuries, including a three-game absence by quarterback Derek Carr.
The team currently has 10 players on injured reserve.
Loomis defended Allen despite the coach’s 18-25 record in two-plus seasons and took issue with characterizations that the Saints were undisciplined under Allen. Jeff Duncan of the Times-Picayune wrote a column pointing out that players had to be told to stop parking in public parking rather than in a team-designated lot nearby.
“We get silly things written like the players aren’t parking in the right spots, and that’s ridiculous. Players have been parking out there for the last 15 years,” Loomis said on the radio. “We’ve got construction going on [at the Saints facility]. We’ve got 100 more employees than we did 10 years ago. That’s just silly. And to equate that with discipline is silly, too. Going into this last game we were the eighth-fewest penalties in the league; that’s more of a comment on discipline than where a player parks.
“But it just gets back to what stares at you right in the face, is that we’ve had an abnormal amount of injuries including to our quarterback, and we haven’t been able to overcome that. And so, that puts pressure and stress on the organization and ultimately, it was cause for a change.”
