Darren Rizzi talks Falcons win, game-changing plays, Browns matchup

Recapping the top five takeaways from the Saints Coaches Show on WWL

Nov 12, 2024 at 02:09 PM

Andrew Lang

New Orleans Saints interim head coach Darren Rizzi joined Voice of the Saints Mike Hoss and Saints legend Bobby Hebert on the Saints Coaches Show on WWL on Monday, Nov. 11 to talk about his first win over the Atlanta Falcons, the upcoming game against the Cleveland Browns and more.

Here are the top five takeaway's from Rizzi's appearance:

1. First win against rival Falcons

Rizzi secured the first victory during his first game as interim head coach, coming away with a 20-17 win over the Atlanta Falcons on Nov. 10 in the Caesars Superdome. The Saints secured the close victory despite being out-performed in some key metrics, losing the time of possession battle by over 10 minutes, gaining 11 less first downs than the Falcons and tallying 103 yards less than Atlanta.

"We're never ever, ever going to apologize, in this league, for winning a game," Rizzi said. "You take them like you can get them, because unfortunately, we've been on the other side of that for a few times, even this year. And so, we might have played even a little bit better in a couple of games and had a couple of losses, where we couldn't finish the deal. And so, I talked about that finish earlier, but the reason we won that football game, we didn't turn the ball over, we didn't have any sacks, we played with a lot of emotion, a lot of passion and we made big plays when we had to. That's why we won the game."

The Saints were also outperformed in the running game, tallying 96 rushing yards while Atlanta racked up 181 yards. However, the Saints did not commit a turnover or allow a sack while picking off Kirk Cousins once and sacking him three times.

"Now, within the rest of those plays — I think we played 162 plays yesterday — within all those plays, is there stuff we got to get better at? Yeah, running the football and stopping the run are definitely two things we got to continue to improve on because I agree with you, too much running for them north and south yesterday, way too much north, not enough south. And so, we got to do a better job there tackling, controlling the line of scrimmage. I completely agree, that's got to be something that we get cleaned up. But listen, you look back at the first time we played them, we turned the ball over a couple times and created 14 points for them. And that was really the difference in that game, and now all of a sudden we played them yesterday and had zero turnovers. So, there's going to be that back and forth in every NFL game or at least most of them and so that's why that turnover deal is a big deal. Now, we you know we picked a pass off and we also had two sack-fumbles. Now fortunately for them unfortunately for us, we didn't get on that, but we actually created a couple opportunities there, but the blocked field goal, the Honey Badger interception, the Chase Young sack, those big plays when we needed them, that was the reason we won the game."

Photos: Game Action | Saints vs Falcons | 2024 NFL Week 10