New Orleans Saints Executive Vice President/General Manager Mickey Loomis said Tuesday evening that the search for the next Saints head coach will not immediately commence.
There are eight games remaining in the 2024 season, and the franchise will concentrate on that task before moving on to the next.
The Saints are 2-7 and have lost seven consecutive games for the first time since 1999 entering Sunday's game against Atlanta (6-3) in the Caesars Superdome.
"That's not something that we're going to be real active with right now," Loomis said on The Saints Hour radio show, broadcast on WWL-870 AM. "There's plenty of time for that when the season ends. Our focus has got to be on our team – our players, our coaches, our staff.
"You learn more about who you have and who the people are that you're working with in adversity than you do when things are going well. As much as Katrina and that whole experience was difficult back in '05, we learned a lot about the people that were with the Saints at that time. It drove a lot of decisions after that.
"This is adversity, it's tough. It's no fun losing games. I can't describe to you – as bad as our fans feel and the things that they feel, believe me, we're all feeling 10 times worse. But we can't just wallow in that.
"We have to get up off the mat and show some fight. And that's true for every single person in this building. And so, we're going to see what we've got over the next few weeks."
Loomis said circumstances helped create this season's reality, and the reality led to the decision Monday to relieve Dennis Allen of his head coaching duties.
Allen, who was hired as head coach in 2022, was 18-25, with the most recent loss being Sunday's 23-22 defeat to Carolina, in which the Panthers broke their five-game losing streak.
"Dennis Allen, I think, is a fantastic football coach and I think anybody in our league who would talk about him thinks he's a fantastic football coach," Loomis said.
"He is. I think in this case the circumstances created the record. That's just the truth and a lot of people don't want to hear it. We get silly things written like the players aren't parking in the right spots, and that's ridiculous. Players have been parking out there for the last 15 years.
"We've got construction going on (at the Saints facility), we've got 100 more employees than we did 10 years ago. That's just silly. And to equate that with discipline is silly, too. Going into this last game we were the eighth-fewest penalties in the league; that's more of a comment on discipline than where a player parks.
"But it just gets back to what stares at you right in the face, is that we've had an abnormal amount of injuries including to our quarterback (Derek Carr), and we haven't been able to overcome that. And so, that puts pressure and stress on the organization and ultimately, it was cause for a change."
The Saints will enter Sunday's game against Atlanta (6-3) in the Caesars Superdome minus center Erik McCoy (injured), cornerback Paulson Adebo (injured), cornerback Marshon Lattimore (traded), safety Will Harris (injured), receiver Rashid Shaheed (injured) and, possibly, receiver Chris Olave (concussion protocol), who all were season-opening starters.
Allen's dismissal led to Darren Rizzi being appointed interim coach. Rizzi was assistant head coach/special team coordinator since 2022, and Rizzi spoke to the team before addressing the media Monday afternoon.
"I thought he did a great job. We talked about what his message would be beforehand and I thought it was well-received," Loomis said. "And, look, any time you have a change in the middle of a season you're going to have some emotion involved with that, and hopefully that emotion creates a little positive bump. And I felt like that happened (Monday).
"I thought Rizzi did a great job talking to the team, talking to the media, describing some things that we wanted to do differently just to hopefully jump-start the back half of the season."
Loomis said Rizzi's role as assistant head coach made him the obvious choice to become interim head coach.
"He is the assistant head coach, that's part of his role," Loomis said. "So he's been involved in a number of those decisions that the head coach makes. I think he's the pretty obvious choice, given his experience, his role as the special teams coach – you do deal with almost every player on the team when you're in that role – so it's a voice that our players have heard before.
"He's used to being up in front of a large group of players and presenting. He's got a great personality and a positive attitude at all times, and, look, he was a candidate when we hired Dennis Allen. He was one of the candidates and had a really strong performance in his interviews. So, I think it was an obvious choice."
Loomis said Rizzi has an effervescent personality and fighter mentality.
"You feel that when you're just talking in a regular conversation with him," Loomis said. "I think that was positively received by our team, certainly by our players and our staff in a really, really, really difficult circumstance."
