Slow starts have gotten most of the blame around the New Orleans Saints offense, but the bigger problem has been sitting in plain sight: turnovers.
That’s the issue that keeps flipping games on its head, and it’s the one Tyler Shough has to clean up against the Atlanta Falcons if the Saints want a different result than they got last week.
The slow-start conversation makes sense. It’s been a recurring theme in the Kellen Moore era, and it’s easy to point to numbers like whether the team is leading after the first quarter.
Those are clean, visible markers. But last week showed why that can be misleading.
New Orleans actually came out better, snapping a streak of 23 straight games without leading after the first quarter. The Saints scored in the first quarter and had a first-half touchdown for the first time this season. Then the fourth quarter happened, and four turnovers on four straight possessions wiped out all of that progress.
That kind of meltdown is extreme, and it’s not something that should happen often. Still, it’s impossible to brush off. The Saints are 1-2 for a reason, and the giveaways have been the common thread.
Seven turnovers in three games is a brutal number, especially when every one of them has come at a damaging moment. New Orleans would likely be undefeated if it simply protected the ball.
The loss to the Lions is the clearest example of how the turnover problem gets miscast as a slow-start issue. The Saints did begin slowly, but they were only down 7-0 at halftime. That’s not an impossible gap, and it matched the halftime deficit they faced against the Ravens.
What changed against Detroit was what happened after that. Shough threw an interception and then fumbled on back-to-back drives in Saints territory, and the Lions turned those short fields into touchdowns. Suddenly, a manageable game became a much bigger hole.
Take away those mistakes, or even just one of them, and Week 1 looks very different. The same logic applies to last week’s collapse. Cut the turnovers in half, and this team could be staring at a completely different record.
The Saints didn’t turn the ball over against the Ravens, and they won. That wasn’t a coincidence.
Of the seven turnovers so far, Shough has been responsible for six. He knows it, and he’s put the burden on himself.
Not every turnover has been directly on him, but that doesn’t change where the pressure sits. Protecting the football has to be his top priority on Monday Night.
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When the Saints finally walked back into the Superdome for that 2006 Monday night game against Atlanta, it was bigger than football. For Joe Horn, who was one of the franchises defining voices at the time, the return carried the weight of a city trying to find its footing again after Hurricane Katrina. It was the kind of night that reminded New Orleans what the team meant, and what the team could mean for the community beyond wins and losses.
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Saints Get An Early Chance To Change A Familiar Falcons Problem
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It is the kind of game that can tell the Saints a lot about where they are headed and whether some of the old frustrations against Atlanta are starting to fade. The timing adds to the mood, too, with this week marking the 20th anniversary of the Saints' return to the Superdome, a reminder of how often this franchise has used the building as a backdrop for turning points and trying to reset familiar narratives. [Read more 🡒]