NEW ORLEANS -- The Saints have been working on their offseason checklist since parting ways as a team two months ago.
The Saints overhauled their offensive staff and replaced longtime coordinator Pete Carmichael with Klint Kubiak, the San Francisco 49ers' former passing game coordinator after finishing 9-8 and missing the playoffs. They informed safety Marcus Maye of his impending release and signed safety Tyrann Mathieu to a two-year, $13 million extension, locking up a key part of the defense for 2024.
"I think realistically, we all could have played better [last season]," Mathieu said on Thursday after agreeing to the new deal. "There was so much excitement, and I think we all thought we'd be much better as far as wins and losses are concerned. ... But I know me personally, I believe in the coaches, I believe in the players in the locker room to help us turn it around. I do believe we have enough guys in our locker room that we could be a pretty good football team."
The new staff members have provided a fresh perspective for a group that Saints general manager Mickey Loomis admitted might have gotten "too comfortable" over the past few years.
Saints coach Dennis Allen said the staff has approached roster evaluations with a positive perspective. He also noted it was important to determine what kind of culture the team wanted to have moving forward.
"I think it all starts with me," Allen said at the combine. "I think setting the mindset for the type of team we're going to be, having that filter down through the coaching staff and the veteran players, leaders on our football team. And we've got to make sure that we're holding everybody accountable to the standard we need to have, to have the type of success that we want to have."
As the new league year looms, the Saints have spent a lot of time looking back at the 2023 season to figure out where they went wrong and how to better set that standard.
"I look at things glass half full. I look at a roster and a team and say, 'Man, if A, B and C happened, we could be really good,'" Loomis said. "And if it doesn't, or we have some injuries or we have some calls that don't go your way, it goes the other direction. We can point to these last three seasons, 9-8, 7-10, 9-8, and say, 'Man those three games, they easily could've gone the other way,' and now we're talking about 12-win seasons."
The team has identified some of the key problems and its biggest regrets: Fixing its red zone problems, lack of consistent pass rush, struggles with the run game. Another of Loomis' regrets was starting offensive tackle Trevor Penning before he was fully ready.
Penning, a 2022 first-round pick, was injured going into the 2023 offseason and lasted five games before losing his starting role for the rest of the year. He was part of the early offensive line chemistry issues that resulted in quarterback Derek Carr getting sacked 17 times in the first six games. Those problems came to a head in what ended up being a pivotal point in the season.
Against the Green Bay Packers in Week 3, Carr was sacked with 10:51 left in the third quarter and left the game with an AC joint sprain in his throwing shoulder. The Saints, up 17-0 at the time, lost 18-17 after kicker Blake Grupe missed a 46-yard field goal at the end of the game.
"There were a few things in that fourth quarter that were out of our control I didn't like that might have changed the outcome of that game," Loomis said at season's end. "But there's always things. There's always a play here, a play there. It's one game, right? Changes the entire course of the season."
Loomis and Allen said they knew the loss could end up haunting the team, although Allen wouldn't pin the season's outcome on one week. But the game's repercussions seemingly trickled into the following week's 26-9 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Carr did not miss that game but turned in one of the worst statistical performances of his career, completing 23-of-37 passes for 127 yards. His 3.43 yards per attempt was the second lowest.
He said in February on the "Two Gs in a Pod" podcast that he was probably more injured than he let on at the time. Although Carr did not miss a game, he said he "tore the heck" out of his shoulder, broke three ribs and injured his back, in addition to two concussions sustained against the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions.
"I think there was a stretch of six or eight games there, after that Green Bay game, that I don't think we played our best football," Allen said at the end of the season. "I think our team started fast this year, I thought we finished strong. I think there was a big chunk of meat in the middle where we didn't handle that as well as we needed to. And certainly, at the time I thought this is one that's going to come back and bite us, and certainly it did."
Mathieu, in particular, lamented the team's 30-22 defeat by the Los Angeles Rams on Dec. 21. The loss took the Saints' postseason fate out of their hands.
"We just wasn't ready, we just didn't do it," Mathieu said. "I think had we won that game and showed up and played to the level we were capable of playing, I think we probably would have punched our ticket in the playoffs last year. I think about that game a lot."
When the new league year begins on Wednesday, the Saints will stop looking back and turn toward the future. But they'll have to apply the lessons learned from their 2023 failures to reestablish the culture that got them to the playoffs from 2017 to 2020.
"It's exciting, it's energizing ... the offensive staff has a ton of things on their plate. They're all basically new," Saints assistant general manager Jeff Ireland said. "They've got a playbook to put together, they've got free agency coming up down the pike. They've got the draft. So they've got a lot on their plate. But they've been fantastic."