Slow starts have been a talking point around the New Orleans Saints offense all year, and for good reason. That issue has lingered since last season, and Kellen Moore has taken plenty of heat for how little it has changed. But while the opening drives have still been a mess, one area has flipped dramatically: the red zone.
The Saints were a problem team inside the 20 a year ago. In 2025, they turned 44.4% of their red zone drives into touchdowns, a worse mark than even the New York Jets.
This season, that number has jumped all the way to 84.2%, second only to the San Francisco 49ers. That kind of leap is not a small adjustment.
It’s the difference between stalling out and finishing drives.
The raw numbers tell the story cleanly. Last year, New Orleans produced 20 touchdowns on 45 red zone attempts.
Already this season, the Saints have 16 red zone touchdowns on just 19 tries. That is easily the biggest turnaround the team has made so far in 2026.
Tyler Shough sits at the center of it.
In the red zone, the job is simple in theory: put points on the board and don’t hand the ball away. Shough has done both better than anyone since arriving in the league. He has not thrown an interception in the red zone, and his 0% interception percentage leads the NFL because, quite literally, nobody can do better than that.
He has also thrown 17 touchdown passes in that area, giving him a 39.5 touchdown rate, the best mark in the league as well. No quarterback has been more efficient at turning red zone snaps into touchdowns or at avoiding the kind of mistake that kills a drive.
There’s more. Shough is completing 74.4% of his passes in the red zone, another best-in-league number.
That matters because completion percentage, touchdowns and interceptions are the three stats that matter most once the field shrinks and the margin for error disappears. Shough leading the league in all three is the kind of production that changes how an offense looks.
The production has shown up across the season, too. Shough has 12 passing touchdowns overall, and 10 of them have come inside the 20.
The Saints have been better this year, and they had already started to flash that improvement late last season. The timing lines up with the quarterback change, and the connection is hard to ignore. When your quarterback is operating that cleanly in the most important part of the field, good offense tends to follow.
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