A Changing of the Guard

NOTHING ENGENDERS the combination of excitement and uncertainty quite like the arrival of football season. The kickoff of the 2022 season proves to be especially anxiety-inducing for Louisiana football fans.

With new coaches at the helm, the New Orleans Saints and the LSU Tigers are embarking on not just new seasons but new eras for the storied programs.

The parallel debuts of Dennis Allen as the Saints’ head coach and Brian Kelly as the LSU head coach have little in common but the timing.

Allen is a familiar face; Kelly is an import from up North. Allen represents continuity; Kelly represents afresh start.

At 50, Allen is relatively young for his job and inexperienced as a head coach. Kelly is neither. He turns 61 in October and has been a head coach for 32 years.

Both take on their new challenges fromdifferent field positions.

Allen ascends from Sean Payton’s defensivecoordinator during the longest stretch of sustainedsuccess in the Saints’ 55-year history.

“We have a foundation and a culture of winningthat has already been built,” Allen said. “I’m going totry and continue that and build on that.”

Kelly arrives from Notre Dame to replace Ed Orgeron in the wake of the most dramatic peak-and-valley juxtaposition of seasons in the Tigers’ 129-year history. He described his new job as “the great opportunity to restore championship-level football to LSU.”

The Saints have had a winning record for fiveconsecutive seasons, narrowly missing the playoffslast season with a 9-8 record despite a monthlongdisplacement due to Hurricane Ida and aninordinate number of absences from key playersand coaches due to injuries and COVID-19 issues.

It was arguably the best one-season coachingjob done by Payton, who was one of the mostsuccessful NFL head coaches of his generationbefore taking what most observers expect to be abrief hiatus.

Payton guided the Saints to a Super Bowl title after the 2009 season – his fourth as head coach– and led nine playoff teams,including seven division champions, in his 15 seasons.(The 2012 Saints finished 7-9 but are not on Payton’s resume since he was suspended that season.)

The Saints’ string off our consecutive NFC South championships came to an end in 2021, but their cumulative record during the last five seasons is second-best in the NFL, behind only the Kansas City Chiefs.

Kelly’s new program is just two seasons removed from catching lightning in a bottle as Orgeron oversaw the group led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Joe Burrow that won the 2019 national championship. By any measure,it was as dominant a season as any college team has had.

But LSU plummeted from the top of the college world in historic fashion. The team slipped to 5-5 in 2020 and opted out of a bowl game opportunity in hopes of mitigating anticipated sanctions from a still-ongoing NCAA investigation. They finished the 2021 season at 6-7.

Orgeron, an assistant on Payton’s 2008 Saints staff, succeeded Les Miles on an interim basis four games into the 2016 season and gained the job on a full-time basis from a reluctant administration. He won a national championship in the third season of what became a tenure of a mere five full seasons before he was fired.

Winning championships is the presumed goal of all football coaches, though just how realistic a goal varies widely from job to job. Allen certainly seems to have a head-start on Kelly in that regard – though no one is predicting a championship for either coach right away.

Payton’s unexpected departure in January came just nine months after the retirement of future Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Brees. It could have led the Saints to tighten their belt in free agency or trade veteran players for draft choices as part of a multi-season transition to the new era.

But the brain trust decided this group isn’t done as championship contenders, even amid the seismic personnel changes.

The Saints signed a handful of key veteran free agents – most notably two former LSU stars in defensive back Tyrann Mathieu (a New Orleans native) and wide receiver Jarvis Landry (a native of Convent, La.) – to bolster the roster.

They traded next year’s No. 1 draft choice and other assets to move up in the draft and grab firstround picks in wide receiver Chris Olave and tackle Trevor Penning to address pressing offensive needs.

In addition, the virtually seamless transition from Payton to Allen and the retention of most of Payton’s widely respected staff demonstrates that the franchise’s success under the former coach is expected to continue.

“This is not a rebuild,” said Executive Vice President of Football Mickey Loomis, who, along with Saints’ owner Gayle Benson and President Dennis Laucha, chose Allen over five other candidates.

Allen described the opportunity to succeed Payton, whom he called “a Hall of Fame football coach,” as simply “a great example to follow.”

Loomis said Allen’s relatively low-key demeanor is somewhat different from Payton’s fiery personality, and whatever differences there might be between the two coaches’ approaches have been kept behind closed doors.

“I don’t think you’re going to look out at practice and go, ‘Oh my God, everything is different,’” Allen said. “There’s going to be a lot of similarities.”

The most obvious difference is Payton was an offensive coach and Brees’ brilliant execution of his creative play calling was the lynchpin of the team’s success.

“Teams do take on the personality of your head coach,” Loomis said. “The whole team took on the personality of Sean Payton, and that’s been a good thing.”

Allen is a defensive coach. His side of the ball complemented the offense in Brees’ final seasons and now appears to be the stronger unit.

Saints fans became accustomed to watching Payton on the sideline studying his play sheet as he called most plays during his tenure, though his longest-tenured lieutenant – Offensive Coordinator Pete Carmichael – periodically assumed play-calling responsibilities and had Payton-like success.

Allen said the post-Payton offense as directed by Carmichael won’t be “too dissimilar” to what it was under Payton and Carmichael.

As for the defense, Allen took the uncommon step of assigning co-coordinator duties to two of his most trusted lieutenants: Defensive Line Coach Ryan Nielsen and Secondary Coach Kris Richard.

But on game days, fans can expect to see Allen looking a bit like Payton with his play sheet in hand, calling the defensive plays. >>

“It’s hard to turn your baby over,” he said.

No one knew it then, but everyone got a sneakpeek at Allen as Saints head coach late last seasonwhen he served as acting head coach in a game againstTom Brady and the reigning Super Bowl championBuccaneers when COVID-19 sidelined Payton.

The Saints defeatedthe Buccaneers 9-0,holding a team led byBrady scoreless for thefirst time in 15 seasons.

Allen, a native of theDallas area who played defensive back at Texas A&M, began his NFL coaching career as a low-level defensive assistant on Payton’s first staff in 2006. After two seasons, he was promoted to secondary coach, and two seasons later, he was part of the staff that guided the Saints to the franchise’s only Super Bowl title.

His contributions to Payton’s success earned him a reputation as one of the brighter young assistants in the NFL. The Denver Broncos hired him to be their defensive coordinator in 2011 and after one season, the Oakland Raiders hired him at age 39 to be their head coach.

The combination of a rookie head coach and a largely dysfunctional organization was a poor mix. Allen was fired four games into his third season after winning eight games and losing 28.

The Saints eagerly welcomed him back as an assistant in 2015 and promoted him to defensive coordinator in 2016.

“We hated it when he left in 2011, andwe couldn’t have been more excited in 2015,”Loomis said.

In all, Allen was a part of the Saints staff for 12 of the 16 seasons that comprised the Payton era. He spent the last seven seasons working alongside Payton in preparation for the next head-coaching opportunity, which has now arrived.

“I’m much further along. I’m much more comfortable sitting in this seat than I was at that point in time,” Allen said on the eve of Saints training camp. “I was 39 years old and had been a coordinator in this league for one year. I’ve seen a lot more happen between that time and this time. I’m much more relaxed and comfortable in that environment now.”

The coaching change in Baton Rouge may not offer the same continuity but brings an experienced coach to guide the Tigers into the post-Orgeron era.

Kelly has a comfort level borne of a series of successful tenures as a head coach: at Grand Valley State (13 seasons), Central Michigan (three seasons), Cincinnati (three seasons) and Notre Dame (12 seasons).

The only thing missing from Kelly’s resume is a national championship. He brought the Fighting Irish to the national championship game during the 2012 season and the CFP semifinals in 2020. Both times, his team fell well short against an Alabama program that now represents his biggest rival in the SEC West.

Kelly won more games than any other coach in Notre Dame history – more than Knute Rockne’s teams won for “The Gipper” (or anyone else), more than Frank Leahy won, more than Ara Parseghian, more than Lou Holtz.

His hiring at LSU marked the first time in 114 years a Notre Dame head coach left of his own volition to coach at another school.

Despite having held one of the marquee jobs in all of sports, Kelly described the attraction of LSU – in addition to a 10-year, $100 million contract – by saying, “I want to be on the Broadway stage.”

He wanted to compete in the most competitive conference in college football – the SEC. He wanted to win a national championship – something each of his most recent LSU predecessors attained.

Kelly realized Notre Dame’s academic standards and the relative recruiting fertility in basketball-rich Indiana versus football-rich Louisiana meant getting to the CFP might be more realistic with the independent Fighting Irish, winning it would be more realistic with the SEC’s Tigers.

He said his first experience recruiting Louisiana players revealed their passion to become Tigers was akin to baseball players from the Northeast wanting to play for the Yankees and hockey players from Montreal wanting to play for the Canadians.

The transition from a Cajun head coach (Orgeron) to a Yankee head coach (Kelly) was stark for LSU, but winning championships transcends all that – as does losing as many games as you win.

Kelly has won 284 games as a college head coach. His teams have failed to have a winning record just three times.

“Brian Kelly is the most accomplished football coach this university has ever hired,” LSU President William F. Tate IV said.

On a caravan throughout the state this summer, Kelly told Tiger Boosters in Metairie to keep their expectations high.

“You should look at our football team and have an expectation of what a head coach has been doing for 32 years. This should be a prepared football team that plays hard for four quarters, that is ready to play every game,” Kelly said.

But even Kelly admitted the 2022 squad is unlikely to look like what LSU fans have come to expect nor what Kelly expects his future Tiger teams to look like.

Orgeron’s program began to wither within days of winning the national championship as players chose to leave early for the NFL or enter the NCAA transfer portal in search of a more advantageous opportunity.

Throw in a series of significant injuries – not unlike the one that hampered the Saints in 2021 – and the Tigers barely had enough scholarship players available (38) to field a team for their 42-21 loss to Kansas State in the Texas Bowl in January.

Kelly scrambled to salvage a recruiting class from high schools ranked No. 12 in the country and judiciously utilized the transfer portal to welcome players via the same avenue that led players out of Baton Rouge.

Despite putting together a roster “creatively,” LSU is still short of the NCAA maximum of 85 scholarship players, though the verbal commitments Kelly has for the 2023 class suggest a bonanza might be on the horizon.

When Kelly was hired, the Massachusetts native said he and his family were “going to immerse ourselves into the culture of Louisiana.”

A few months later, he said he had “gotten to love where I’m at.”

“I love the people,” he said. “They love football. They love family. They love food. That fits me really well. I guess I should have been in the South all along.”

The precedent for the Saints and LSU starting the same season with new head coaches has happened once before.

In 2000, Jim Haslett took over for Mike Ditka as the Saints’ head coach and Saban took over for Hal Hunter, who had coached the last game of the 1999 season after Gerry DiNardo was fired.

Both of those changes demonstrated the first season isn’t always a predictor of how a coach’s tenure will go.

Haslett guided the Saints to a division title and the franchise’s firstever playoff victory in his first season, but none of his subsequent five teams would make the playoffs.

Saban’s first season wasn’t anything special. The Tigers finished 8-4, but the season laid the foundation for a pivotal tenure that led to the school’s first national championship in 45 years.

Regardless of past successes, fans of both teams will have to wait and see what happens as the 2022 season unfolds.