The New Orleans Saints have made it to their bye week of the 2025 season. Lucky to have it, they have a lot to self-scout if they want to prevent double-digit losses on the season.
One of their biggest bugaboos has been their red zone offense. It's something that has persisted since week one and showed up even when the black and gold made a switch at quarterback. A direct tie to scoring, it might even be their biggest issue of the season if nearly two-thirds of their drives flame out once they reach the 20-yard line.
Luckily, head coach Kellen Moore uses his bye week to study football. "We'll go through a lot of self-scouting throughout the next couple of days just going through our season and focus on the things that we want to improve on," he said when asked how he'll spend the bye week. "You have to do a great job of digesting all the information."
The Saints' red zone offense is literally the bottom of the barrel
Currently, the New Orleans Saints have only scored a touchdown 38.46% of the time that they're in the red zone, which puts them last in the National Football League. They're actually even the only team below the 40% mark so far in 2025.
The team seems to get antsy whenever they get in that part of the field. Notable misses came with Spencer Rattler targeting Chris Olave in the end zone. While you take that with a grain of salt because of a quarterback change, you don't want to ignore it completely because it's been a team wide issue.
Playcalling can be questionable as they near the end zone as well as penalties arising. It isn't one constant issue. That may be easier to pinpoint and address. Unfortunately for the Saints, anything that could go wrong has seemed to go wrong, sometimes in conjunction with each other leading to field goals attempts.
To make matters worse, their kicker, Blake Grupe, has a small case of the yips, making only 17 of his 23 field goal attempts. However, the team can't put the blame of the struggling offense on their kicker. No no, the entire team is to blame, one man can't make an NFL team 2-8.
Unfortunately for the team and for the fans, this is something that might take some time to fix. Things like this don't typically tend to get better overnight, even if the head coach is actively working on a solution.