The New Orleans Saints just put up the most embarrassing display of rushing offense I've seen in my life and the worst the team has seen in decades. The Saints ran for 18 yards on 17 attempts. Tyler Shough led the team with 7 yards, and Kendre Miller and Alvin Kamara both averaged 0.8 yards per carry.
It was an absolutely embarrassing, a word that has been associated with the team too much for comfort this year, performance by the run game, and we haven’t seen something like this from the Saints since the early 90’s.
The Saints passed the ball on 72% of their offensive plays, and while that would have been a bigger talking point in most games, the rushing attack was so bad that no cares about the overwhelming imbalance. The running game was so bad when they did run that any time they didn’t felt like a blessing. Still, you aren’t going to win many games with a rushing attack so poor.
One stat really hammers home how the Saints rushing attack was fool's gold vs Giants
Not having a single runner go for 10 yards on the day is bad enough, especially when you’re looking to get 10 yard runs sprinkled in throughout the game. Jaylen Warren had 29 yards after his first carry. To really hammer home how bad the Saints were on the ground, every player who carried the ball for Pittsburgh had one run that surpassed each of the Saints rushers’ individual total.
Yes, that includes Aaron Rodgers.
Shough led the team with 7 total yards. Rodgers had a run of 8 yards, and if it weren’t for two kneel downs, he would have also had more yards than any Saints rusher.
It’s deeper than Travis Etienne returning. The Saints running backs are receiving zero support from the offensive line. There’s not nearly enough lanes, so the backs aren’t alone in their failures. They’re constantly getting hit behind the line of scrimmage,
That’s just not a recipe for success. Bring Etienne back and it’ll fail the same way it did when he was healthy if nothing changes up front. Sunday was rock bottom for the unit, but it wasn’t an aberration.
Next week won’t be less than 20 yards, but there’s no reason to believe it will be good. We saw a better performance against the Giants, but that was clearly fool’s gold. When you go against one of the league's worst rush defenses, sometimes the results can be deceiving.
The performance the Saints put up against the Steelers holds more weight because it was historically bad, but also because it is reflective of issues they’ve had all year, just to the highest degree.
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