The Saints felt stuck. Now, they have a direction

It's stunning to think about how much your reality can change in 50 days.

Fifty days ago, right here, in this space, we were trying to make sense of the Saints' massive win — or what seemed like a massive win — over the Cowboys in Dallas, where, just a few hours earlier, Tyrann Mathieu gave a rousing speech to his teammates about how it was time for them to believe enough to jump out of the plane and go to war.

Fifty days later, people are jumping off the plane and being pushed out of the plane -- and it looks like the plane itself might just crash. Fifty days ago, Dennis Allen was popping out and showing them. Fifty days later, Dennis Allen is gone. Marshon Lattimore is gone. And the Saints, at least the way we think of them, are gone.

You can't really be upset that it all ended like this. New Orleans kept its playoff window open for about 17 years. Fifty days ago, it was still open, wide open. And now it's shut and you have to wonder how quickly it can open back up. Young teams are winning in the NFL because those teams have drafted well. So, things can change for the better just as quickly as they can change for the worse, but that window is now shut. Marshon getting sent to Washington just confirmed that.

You probably would have thought the stars would feel a little further away today, but they don't. It sometimes feels like Marshon and Alvin and Ram and Marcus Williams and all those guys who were part of the 2017 draft class just got here. Sometimes it feels like it just happened, and it all ended too soon. But that was two thousand, seven hundred, forty-eight days ago. That's an entire window in and of itself. And now it's over.

Alvin just signed an extension, but Marshon is gone and Ramcyzk's career seems over, and he'll retire next offseason. Williams left a while ago. Trey Hendrickson never counted here except as a retroactive source of pain. And you know what? The timing of it all sort of feels right. It doesn't really feel that bad because it just feels like it is time to move on, to do something different, to start over and find a new way and locate a new window. But that old one? It's definitely over. And you know what's weird? The stars kind of feel closer. One day ago, they felt stuck.

The Saints have to hire a new head coach. They're going to have to clean up their cap. They have to rebuild their roster. There are many things to get right to actually turn this thing around, and it will likely take some time and there will probably be some wrong turns along the way. But New Orleans now has a clear direction. There probably won't ever be a complete teardown, but this is now more of a rebuild than it was at any point since 2015, and that makes it all a little bit easier.

Winning seven games when you're cleaning up your cap and trying to build something is a perfectly fine outcome — maybe even thrilling because you might see hope and a way to add to it. Winning seven games when you're trying to hold onto something and your roster is getting older and you have no cap space or assets to create a better future is a bit hopeless. Sometimes, it's even a disaster. New Orleans started committing to cleaning up the cap and finding a better way last offseason. Now it's fully committed.

The Saints do have some good, young pieces. Alontae Taylor, Pete Werner, Taliese Fuaga, Chris Olave, Rashid Shaheed and Erik McCoy are all good, foundational pieces. But New Orleans needs to find more. A lot more. The team has drafted one Pro Bowler since 2017, none since 2019. That's not enough. You can't find sustained success like that.

The defensive line needs to get rebuilt from the ground up, maybe even from scratch. The offensive line still has holes despite all of the investments they've made. The team needs another receiver, more tight ends, another running back. They need to get a linebacker for the future. They need another safety and someone in the pipeline behind Tyrann Mathieu. And, more than anything, the Saints need to find a franchise quarterback. Derek Carr is a fine fill-in. He isn't the answer. The team needs someone worth building around.

Fifty days ago, no one was thinking about fifty days later. Everything seemed right. Everything seemed hopeful. The Saints were going to be relevant, and if there was any talk about the upcoming future it was about whether or not the Saints should be buyers at the trade deadline. We wondered if trading for a receiver and trying to make a run in a weak NFC would make sense. Would it have worked with a healthy team? Could the Saints have gotten there? Won a playoff game? Maybe. Maybe not.

If that had happened, the offseason would have looked different. The Saints probably would have kicked the can some on contracts, added some talent and tried to gear up for another opportunity to sneak into the playoffs in a weak conference. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe it wouldn't. This year and next year would have been more comfortable, for sure. There are likely some really tough times in the near future. Still, there's just something that feels a little bit better about knowing that the next path, even if it doesn't quite arrive, is about building something more lasting and permanent than trying to patch together something from the past.