Can Saints, Dennis Allen slay another dragon in Jalen Hurts?

The Dennis Allen Redemption Tour has been a bigger smash success than anyone could have predicted through the first two weeks of the 2024 season.

But now the Saints coach has to exorcise one of his biggest demons that dates back to the years when he was crushing it as New Orleans’ defensive coordinator: Stopping Jalen Hurts.

The Saints’ defense has struggled to stop mobile quarterbacks for years, but the Eagles quarterback is the specific face that Allen must see in his nightmares.

Back when they first faced each other in Hurts’ NFL starting debut in 2020, the Saints were in the middle of a four-year stretch where they had the league’s best run defense. But they were so thrown off by Hurts that they allowed both the quarterback and running back Miles Sanders to each surpass 100 yards while the Eagles team ran for a total of 246.

It was more of the same in 2021 when the Eagles ran for 242 against the Saints – 69 by Hurts, 94 by Sanders and 63 by RB Jordan Howard.

“I'd say they've been fairly effective running the ball on a lot of teams. And yet I know that's a big part of what Philly has done offensively over the last few years,” said Allen, who mostly sidestepped the narrative of the Eagles being his personal version of Moby Dick.

Allen added that, “I think the two years that we played them, one year we did a good job of kind of minimizing Jalen Hurts in terms of being able to run the football, but didn't do as good a job of stopping the running back.”

Technically, that may be sort of true (Hurts averaged just 3.8 yards per carry in the second meeting, with his 69 yards coming on 18 carries. But he still ran for three TDs and had two runs of 20-plus yards in that game.)

Allen was correct, however, that the Saints failed in both cases to stop the running backs. Sanders averaged 5.9 yards per carry in that game, Howard 6.3.

A similar thing happened in 2022 when the Ravens ran for 188 in the Superdome, with 82 by QB Lamar Jackson and 93 by RB Kenyan Drake.

Oh – and now the Eagles have upgraded dramatically in that area by signing one of the NFL’s most dynamic running backs in Saquon Barkley.

“(Hurts’) ability to run the football makes things more challenging in run defense, because they can have the runner Saquon Barkley going this way with some sort of counteraction, with the quarterback keeping it on the backside. They make you play 11-on-11 football, and they do a really good job of it,” Allen said. “So (Barkley) being able to run the football, and then the quarterback at any time being able to pull the ball – or get into some sort of spread-out formation, whether it's a no-back formation or one-back set, gets the defense spread out and then run quarterback draws or quarterback lead plays, I mean, they know what they're doing in the run game.”

New Saints linebacker Willie Gay added that the addition of Barkley makes the Eagles backfield “like a two-headed snake.”

“He’ll bite you on this side, he’ll bite you on that side,” Gay said. “You gotta respect Jalen, and if you overplay Jalen, now you got Saquon. If you overplay Saquon, you forgot about Jalen.”

Perhaps the NFL has caught up to Hurts and Philly’s scheme a bit. He fell from 5.6 yards per carry in both 2020 and 2021 to 4.6 in 2022 and 3.9 in 2023. But Saints defensive coordinator Joe Woods, who used to face Jackson twice a year as the Browns’ DC from 2020-2022, said he’s tried a bunch of different approaches in the past – some more effective than others.

“Some of the stuff didn't work, but eventually you figure out what's the right game plan or what gives you the best opportunity to win. And I feel like we have a good game plan,” Woods said. “We have some different change-ups. It's not gonna be perfect, but you have to commit yourself to stopping the run game.

“What happens when you play teams where the quarterback runs the ball, they're playing with 11, so now you have to play with 11. So that guy sitting in the post, you can't sit in the post. So you have to commit yourself to stopping the run first and foremost, based on the situation, and then go from there.”

Another unfortunate side effect we’ve seen at times from the Saints defense when they commit so heavily to stopping the run is abandoning their pass rush or aggressiveness in general. Oftentimes defensive end Cameron Jordan has lamented the frustration of just sitting back in a prevent shell around the line of scrimmage.

And far too many times that hasn’t worked when just one rusher gets undisciplined and leaves a lane for the QB to escape.

“We wanted to make him an in-pocket passer, which sort of stinks as a rusher,” Jordan said last year when the Saints were facing a much-less dynamic QB in Bears rookie Tyson Bagent (and still let him loose a couple times). “You have to slow yourself down and play this game of, ‘Don’t let him escape the pocket.’ And then he escapes the pocket, then you get yelled at, and then you have to play with even more emphasis of, ‘Don’t actually throw pass rush moves and just watch the passer.’”

Even last year, when the Saints didn’t face any true dynamic mobile QBs, they still had a maddening trend of allowing even garden-variety quarterbacks to scramble free against them. New Orleans allowed the most rushing yards on scrambles of any team in the NFL according to NextGen Stats in 2023, getting burned by the likes of Bagent, Trevor Lawrence, Jordan Love, Baker Mayfield and Bryce Young.

And in general, the Saints’ run defense has really eroded over the past two years after that long stretch when they dominated the NFL for the better part of 2017-2021.

New Orleans ranked 24th in the NFL in run defense in 2022 (allowing 130.5 yards per game) and 22nd in 2023 (119.9).

They’ve added some talent and a great deal of speed in the front seven in free agency with Gay and defensive end Chase Young. (Gay has played sparingly so far this season, though it will be interesting to see if that changes Sunday since he earned a reputation as a mobile-QB spy during his first four years with the Chiefs.)

And so far, the Saints rank third in the NFL this season with 63.0 rushing yards allowed per game and first in Run Yards Over Expectation according to NextGenStats with a total of minus-83.

But Allen was the first to point out that the greatest asset for any run defense in any matchup is playing with a lead. So, funny enough, this is also something that Klint Kubiak can help the Saints solve.