New Orleans Saints All-Time Coaching Staff
By Darral Nail
The New Orleans Saints have had some amazing staffs over their storied history and this post takes a look at the best of the best at the different coaching positions. Let’s start with the most important, which is the head coach.
New Orleans Saints All-Time Coaching Staff
Head Coach: Sean Payton (2006-Present)
While assembling a list of what I believe to be the New Orleans Saints’ all-time greats at each individual coaching position was not a simple endeavor, the head coach category represented a no-brainer.
A review of Sean Payton’s accomplishments in New Orleans is staggering, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the team’s performance before his arrival. Over the 14 seasons in which Payton has served as head coach (excluding 2012), the Saints have emerged victorious in nearly two thirds (143) of regular season contests (224).
Perhaps more telling is the 17 postseason appearances for the Saints under their current leader, given that the team had made a total of six such appearances in the 40 years before Payton made his way to south Louisiana
The second longest-tenured coach in the NFL, trailing only New England’s Bill Bellichik, Payton has brought a steadying force to a franchise that had previously lacked organizational stability, something which will almost certainly aid the team’s efforts as they embark on the first season of the post-Brees era.
Honorable Mention: Jim Mora (1986-1996), Jim Haslett (2000-2005)
No accounting of Saints coaches would be complete without mention of Jim E. Mora. Like Payton, he led the team to then-unprecedented heights, in form of the Saints’ first four postseason appearances in club history. For an inept franchise that to that point had existed in the public conscious largely as a punch-line, Mora was the first to prove that success in professional football was indeed possible in New Orleans.
While most Who Dats are likely to hold the elder Mora in high regard, the case for the man who coached the Saints to their first postseason victory is a bit more complicated.
While Jim Haslett posted a regular season record of 45-51 in his six years as the head man in NOLA, he entered his final season with the Saints, the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged 2005 campaign, with a record of 42-38, good enough for a .525 winning percentage to that point. Though it ended poorly, the team’s relative success during Haslett’s tenure in New Orleans allows him to be listed alongside Payton and Mora.