The Saints offense looked rejuvenated last week.
The New Orleans Saints are coming off their first win in nearly two months and will host the Cleveland Browns on Sunday afternoon. Both teams have three or fewer wins through nine games (10 for the Saints because they haven’t had their bye), so this game will do more for determining a top draft pick than any playoff implications.
After firing Dennis Allen a week ago, the entire Saints offense looked rejuvenated. Derek Carr looked good with 270 yards and two scores, Alvin Kamara had another 100+ yard game and Marques Valdez-Scantling did his best Randy Moss impression with a three-catch, 109-yard, two-touchdown performance. Darren Rizzi had his guys fired up and ready to play, the only question is, can that carry over into this week as well?
The Saints get a Browns defense that is pretty similar to Atlanta’s in the fact that they’re not great in any one area, but they also aren’t super bad in any area. They currently rank 21st in points per game allowed, giving up 23.7 points per game, which is 0.1 worse than the Falcons.
In terms of passing defense, the Browns are allowing 205 yards per game through the air, which is 13th in the league. Their secondary is composed of guys like Denzel Ward, Martin Emerson, Greg Newsome II and Grant Delpit, who are all pretty recognizable names.
Outside of Ward, who’s given up a 43.2% completion percentage this year, their corners haven’t been great. Emerson and Newsome have combined to allow 50 receptions, 716 yards and seven touchdowns on 78 targets. On top of that they haven’t recorded a single interception and have just four PBUs between them (Ward has 14 by himself).
To say the Saints WR is thin would be an understatement. MVS did a great job of creating explosive plays for this offense last week, but I don’t think we’ll see that every week. Outside of him, Saints WRs recorded three catches for 44 yards on Sunday. I think we’ll see a lot of Alvin Kamara, Taysom Hill, Juwan Johnson and Foster Moreau again this week with some help from MVS, Kevin Austin, Mason Tipton and maybe Cedric Wilson if he’s healthy.
Defensively, the Browns are also alright at defending the run, giving up 120 yards per game and an average of 4.5 yards per carry. They get a Saints offense that has been pretty bad rushing the ball this year. Last week, they could only average 3.6 yards per carry against a pretty poor run defending team in Atlanta, but they’re supposed to get Eric McCoy back for the first time since week three, so I expect to see them get better in that area. If he’s actually 100%, it should make a big difference.
One area that really scares me is Cleveland’s pass rush. They rank 7th in the league in sacks per game (3.0) and have Myles Garrett and Zadarius Smith coming off the edge against Trevor Penning and rookie Taliese Fuaga. If they get consistent pressure on Carr, this whole game will change. We all know he really struggles with pressure in his face, so if he doesn’t have a clean pocket, it’s game over.
Overall, it’s hard to tell exactly which version of the Saints we’re going to get on Sunday. Will we get last week’s team that looked excited to be out there or are they going to revert back to the team we saw lose seven straight under DA? Only time will tell, unfortunately.
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