Quick Slant: MNF - This Momentary Distraction
Saints @ Packers, Monday @ 8:15 PM
It is fitting that snow is expected in Green Bay on Monday night; the 2024 Saints are reminiscent of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. They swaggered past Week 2, much like Napoleon cantered towards Moscow. Banners flapping in the wind, drunk on hubris and adrenaline; the Saints had just destroyed the mighty Cowboys under the roof of their own magnificent fortress, and next, they were coming for the NFL. But the hardships came fast; fate stalked them one by one like a dark thing with teeth, claiming one frozen soldier after another: Ramczyk, Shaheed, Adebo, Olave, Hill, Carr, Kamara. Today, the Saints trudge through the ice, looking for Moscow; they stagger through what particle is left of 2024, the echoes of early triumphs swallowed now by the silence of a swinging pendulum that never came back around.
The Saints scored 91 points in the first two games of the season—four shy of an NFL record held by the 1968 Oakland Raiders. People pointed their fingers as if they had known all along; Pete Carmichael was gone, replaced by Klint Kubiak, whose father had helped invent the Shanahan offense in Denver in the 1990s. Klint’s time under the prophets of the new Shanahan system had led him to this moment; under his learned approach, the Saints had gone from the lowest play-action usage to the highest—it was just that simple. The writing was on the wall; the offense was fixed, along with Derek Carr, and the Saints were going to cruise to the NFC South crown. But the coming weeks had other plans, and the Saints have barely won since.
Once, it appeared the Packers would be claimed by similar misfortune. At the appalling final moments of the second game of the entire season—half football contest, half exhibition—on a patchy, slippery field in Brazil, Jordan Love had his knee buckle under the weight of a defender, a definitive pop vibrating through it at 60 frames per second on the grainy zoomed-in replay that spread through the internet like electricity. The internet was convinced Love’s season was over and Ryan Tannehill would be a Packer by dawn. But a funny thing happened. Love missed only two games, and Malik Willis, his unheralded understudy, played well in his absence.
The Packers survived then, as they would continue to through the losses of Jaire Alexander, MarShawn Lloyd, AJ Dillon, Luke Musgrave, Christian Watson, Romeo Doubs, and others. Through the attrition, they are still present in the Super Bowl discussion despite being third in their own division. They may be more or less out of the race to win the NFC North, but make no mistake; the Packers are firmly in the race to win it all.
The Saints will attempt to spoil the Packers’ good thing. The Packers will try to hold court. They meet Monday night on a frozen battlefield at Lambeau on a brisk holiday night directly preceding one of these two teams’ descent toward an eventual Waterloo. Which will succumb under the ice and snow, and which will become the other’s fatal mistake?
Saints’ Implied Team Total: 14
The Saints enter with the lowest implied team total of any team on the week, ranking 20th in EPA per play and 23rd in offensive success rate. They rank 23rd in EPA per dropback and 30th in offensive success rate on dropbacks.
It seems like a distant memory, but New Orleans looked like they might have a historically good offense after Week 2. They were first by a mile in EPA per play.
Since then, they’ve been a study on how quickly perceptions can change. They’ve been 26th in EPA per play since Week 3.
The Saints run an average of 65 plays a game at a below-average pass rate of 55%. Their neutral pass rate is low at 41%.
So much of what they’ve done this year is difficult to decipher today; the extent of the offensive personnel the Saints have lost this season is like The Rapture. Monday, the Saints will be without their primary QB, RB, TE, and their top three WRs—their entire skill core. Due to this incredible amount of in-season turmoil, it is difficult to trust their most engrained tendencies, never knowing if their approach was based on sheer will or catered to personnel that is no longer on the field.
To complicate matters, the Saints initially turned to Spencer Rattler when Carr was injured earlier this year, but he played badly enough to garner a switch to Jake Haener. Haener resumed the assignment with the more recent and final Carr injury but was so untenable that he couldn’t make it one game before the Saints returned to Rattler.
When Carr has played a meaningful amount of plays, the Saints have unsurprisingly been a better offense, but that hasn’t manifested into an overly discernable difference in the stats that matter for fantasy. Without Carr, the Saints have performed nearly identically in passing yards and TDs and been barely better in rushing yards and TDs.
We know Carr was brilliant in Weeks 1-2; since then, he hasn’t set himself apart in terms of EP; however, he is significantly more efficient than Rattler, whose -4.6 FPOE/G since Week 3 trails only Jacoby Brissett, Gardner Minshew, Tim Boyle, and Daniel Jones.
One thing seems relatively clear: Rattler has a better shot at meaningful fantasy stats than Haener. If anything, we know that he’s a better rusher; in college, Rattler had 419 rushing yards, while Haener had -102 (in college, sack yardage is subtracted from a QB’s rushing totals).
There are three Saints players with market shares north of 15% in their past six games: Taysom Hill (22%), Alvin Kamara (20%), and Marquez Valdes-Scantling (15%). Two have already been ruled out (Hill, Kamara), and the other is questionable with what is listed as “Chest/Illness.”
If it was already difficult to trust Rattler, the absence of his sturdiest pass-catchers only amplifies this mistrust. There was some optimism that Chris Olave, recovering from his second concussion of the season, would suit up this week after being designated to return and putting in two limited practices, but the organization has (rightly) chosen to play it safe in a lost year, and Olave is not yet ready.
In one of the stranger irregularities of the season, the Packer’s pass defense looks dominant in EPA per dropback allowed, ranking sixth, but awful in defensive success rate on dropbacks, ranking 31st. This is by far the biggest discrepancy between dropback EPA allowed and dropback success rate allowed in either direction.
These ranks tell us the Packers are the ultimate bend-don’t-break pass defense—poor at preventing long, successful drives through the air but good at avoiding big passing plays.
Green Bay plays the fourth-most zone defense, allowing the eighth-fewest fantasy points per dropback in zone coverages. Like most teams, their primary alignment is Cover 3. They run the second-most Cover 2 shell, which harmonizes well with their pliant tendencies of mitigating deep shots and allowing completions underneath; Cover 2 is made to do just this. They also run the fifth-most Cover 6, but this only constitutes 11.3% of their total defensive alignments.
The only active Saints that register in Fantasy Points’ Matchup Expected Fantasy Points model are TE Juwan Johnson and WR Mason Tipton. Neither ranks inside of the top 90 among WRs and TEs.
By having a neutral matchup against the specific personnel, Johnson has the best matchup of the week; the other Saints’ pass-catchers are too uncertain or too overmatched by the Packers’ secondary. Alexander, the Packers’ top CB, who has been out since October 27th, is probably on the right side of questionable and could return to complete a Green Bay secondary that can be among the NFL’s best when healthy.
The Saints rank seventh in EPA per rush and tenth in offensive success rate on rushes. The Packers rank ninth in EPA per rush allowed and 11th in defensive success rate on rushes.
Kamara will miss the game; he has been one of the most heavily utilized RBs in the league this season. Kamara ranks eighth in rushing attempts and first in targets, adding up to second in opportunities, which only trails Saquon Barkley. Unlike Barkley, Kamara hasn’t been overly efficient, ranking 32nd in YPC, 38th in FPOE, and just 15th in TDs. Outside of an anomalous performance against Dallas in Week 2, where he gained 28 FPOE, he has hovered around zero all year long. But Kamara will check out; presumably, Kendre Miller will check in.
Miller had plenty of talent coming out of TCU and the 2022/2023 National Championship game; a hulking 220-pound monster with excellent athleticism, he was drafted in the third round of the 2023 NFL Draft. Ever since, he’s been more or less a rumor. Battling injuries throughout the off-season, it was clear that Miller ended up on former HC Dennis Allen’s last nerve. Now, under interim HC Darren Rizzi, there is a budding chance for a new start. With Kamara out of the lineup, Miller seems in line for a big audition.
In Week 18 last year, Miller was entrusted with 13 carries, which he transferred into 73 yards (5.3 YPC) and a TD. He offered no supplements from the passing game.
Trusting Miller in your lineup against a tough defense like Green Bay takes brass jingle bells, especially when hindered by almost the worst supporting cast imaginable. He should have the work to himself (although the Saints do have Jamaal Williams and Clyde Edwards-Helaire on the roster), but he should see an abundance of stacked boxes and never be left alone.
Packers’ Implied Team Total: 28.5
The Packers enter as 14.5-point favorites with the second-highest implied team total of any team this week. They rank first in NFL Elo’s (weekly) Power Rankings, which assesses each team relative to its opponent.
