Why the 2025 Saints will be the worst team of all time

 When you first hear that the New Orleans Saints have signed Derrick Carr you may think that good times are rolling in The Big Easy. However, that is not for long if their current trends continue. The Saints have continued to field relatively competitive teams in the years since the franchises all time greatest player, Drew Breeze retired. This is made all thew more impressive by the fact that they have cycled through two coaches in that time which included the departure of franchise great Sean Payton. 

Though the team has continued to find some success in recent years employing home town Louisiana players including Jarvis Landry and Tyron Matthew the good times in The Big Easy will soon hit a pothole. This is because of the strategy that the team has used to acquire and retain pieces in the twilight of Breeze’s career and so forth which included salary cap manipulation. 

The manipulation that the Saints have employed is nothing new in the NFL. It can be defined as salary cap deferrals, which essentially prolongs a players salary cap hit over future years so that that team can accommodate more highly payed players in a given year. This deferral is carried out through signing bonus and eventually comes back to haunt even the most frugal of organizations. Franchise cornerstone receiver Michael Thomas will be at the forefront of this controversy as he is due to cost the Saints over 59 million dollars in dead cap money issued in signing bonuses.

The Saints however, have mapped out there future and see the light which we are all blind to at the moment. They will continue attempting to field competitive teams in Derrick Carrs tenure which is most likely to last 2 years in conjunction with the rest of the teams aging core. But it will be at that point, whether Derrick Carr walks away holding a Lombardi or flames out in the regular season the Saints will tear the entire team down to the studs. This tear down will include finally taking the salary cap bath that they have been repressing for the past 3+ seasons. 

They will be subject to the biggest salary cap dump in a single season of any team in NFL history, which will resort in the 2025 Saints being the WORST football team in the history of the NFL. That is, record wise as they will walk away with an all-time worst 0-17 record while carrying over 100 million dollars in dead cap money for a single season. If you are a Saints fan this may sound like a nightmare, but those nightmares will be short lived. This is because the Saints have done this strategically. 

Eligible to come out of college for the NFL draft in thew 2026 draft is a player who has a name as synonymous with football as Lombardi or Landry. This is of course Arch Manning, who hails from a family of football royalty, namely his uncles Peyton and Eli. The former Colts and Giants quarterbacks are not the only football players in the family, rather it was their father Archie Manning. Archie and Arch, who bare the same name both have more than a few ties to the Big Easy.

Starting with Arch, he grew up in NOLA and attended the same high school that Peyton and Eli had in their youth, where he broke seemingly all the school records his uncles had set. This school off course was attended by Peyton and Eli pryor to Arch because Archie has his own ties to the city. 

Archie was the second overall pick in the 1971 NFL draft by the New Orleans Saints in the days prior to the Superdome, when the teams nickname was the “Aints” as in “They aint done nothing”. He was also the last quarterback that the Saints drafted in the first round. Archie never hoisted a Lombardi trophy but he did bring the team relevance for the first time in its history which forever endeared him to the city.

The Saints missed their window to get Peyton or Eli, though they made up for that by lucking into Drew Breeze’s illustrious career via free agency. Despite this it is clear they want to position themselves so that the Fleur-de-lis is once again on a Manning’s helmet. The pain of what will be the NFL’s worst season ever via the return of the “Aints” will be a hard but necessary antidote for a franchise facing NFL cap induced purgatory.  Manning is a name that opens doors in New Orleans like no other and that will continue when Arch Manning goes marching in as the number one overall draft pick in the 2026 NFL draft.