The Saints started the season 2-0 with blowout victories over the Panthers and Cowboys.
But those two wins seem like they were a long, long time ago, particularly as the Saints lost their sixth straight game on Sunday.
New Orleans had not lost six in a row since 2005 — before the beginning of the Sean Payton era that lasted through 2021.
Head coach Dennis Allen was asked if he had concerns about his job security after the club’s Week 7 loss to Denver, and said no. He wasn’t asked directly about that again after Sunday’s 26-8 loss to the Chargers. But he was asked if he feels like he needs to have conversations with the front office about the state of the team at 2-6.
“We have conversations every day, you know what I mean? So I don’t feel any more sense of, having to have these conversations,” Allen said in his postgame press conference. “Look, I think we all understand that it’s a results-oriented business. And we need to play better football.
“I think we all understand that.”
One of the ways the Saints tried to do that on Sunday was by switching from quarterback Spencer Rattler to Jake Haener in the third quarter. But that didn’t really work, as the Saints scored just three points with Haener in.
“I just felt like we needed to do something to try to get something going offensively,” Allen said of switching QBs. “We weren’t able to move the football and I felt like we needed to do something to try to create some sort of spark.”
Allen noted quarterback Derek Carr, who’s been out since suffering an oblique injury against Kansas City on Oct. 7, could potentially return in Week 9. But even if he doesn’t, New Orleans has to play better against the Panthers next Sunday afternoon.
“The message is, it’s the people in the room in there that are going to have to change it,” Allen said. “Nobody’s coming from outside the building. It’s going to have to be the people in the locker room, coaches, to fix it. That’s what it is. And we have to pay better attention to all the details. And we have to do a better job of coaching all the details, because the details matter in our league and we don’t get to pick and choose which ones do and which ones don’t.”