There’s one easy area to point to as a criticism of Dennis Allen’s first year as New Orleans Saints head coach: a lack of aggression on fourth downs. No offense attempted fewer fourth-down conversions than Allen’s offense last year (11). Whether he trusted his defense too much or didn’t trust his quarterbacks enough, Allen chose to kick the ball away whenever given the opportunity.
But this lack of aggression went under the microscope in an article from Football Outsiders analyst Aaron Schatz, who used FO’s Aggressiveness Index to rank every decision-maker from around the NFL. This tool has been in use since 2006, which Schatz describes as: “The goal was to find a way to rank coaches based on their tendencies on fourth downs in a manner that was easy to understand but accounted for the different rates at which the average coach will choose to ‘go for it’ in different situations.”
And Allen ranked 30th out of last year’s 32 head coaches. Only New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and New York Jets coach Robert Saleh were less aggressive. Belichick has reversed his tendencies on fourth downs from earlier in his career, when the league was more conservative on average — and no one seems to quite understand what prompted that decision. Saleh was dealing with an even more fraught quarterback situation than the Saints last season, so it makes sense that he didn’t roll the dice in high-leverage situations.
Still, that’s not where you want to see the Saints ranking. Allen had the benefits of a veteran quarterback under center in Andy Dalton and some talented weapons like Alvin Kamara, Chris Olave, and Juwan Johnson at his disposal. Pete Carmichael deserves some blame too for taking Taysom Hill out of the playbook. Hill only had two rushing attempts on fourth down all season while remaining highly effective in short-yardage situations. He averaged 7.9 yards per carry when the offense needed 3 yards or fewer, converting 17 first downs on 26 attempts (65.4%).
Hopefully the Saints can improve in this area. Maybe it means more carries for Hill on fourth down, but that alone isn’t going to fix the problem. Allen needs to act more aggressively and give his team more opportunities to win a game with the ball in their hands than with their backs against the wall.