New Orleans Saints general manager Mickey Loomis defended dismissed head coach Dennis Allen on Tuesday in his first public comments since Monday's firing.
During an interview on WWL-AM, Loomis blamed "circumstances" and injuries that led to a 2-7 record, pointing to quarterback Derek Carr missing games and other issues, including having 10 players on injured reserve.
"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, via the team's official website. "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."
After a 2-0 start to the season, the Saints lost seven consecutive games, including Sunday's defeat to the Carolina Panthers -- a team they'd destroyed in Week 1.
In 79 career games as a head coach with the Saints and Oakland Raiders, Allen has a 26-53 record.
Some Saints fans will likely feel that Loomis is gaslighting them, given how the team had collapsed under Allen's watch. The GM called out a column by Jeff Duncan of the Times-Picayune that pointed out that players had to be told to stop parking in public parking rather than in a team-designated lot nearby to show that Allen's tenure was misunderstood.
"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," Loomis said. "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, 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 named assistant head coach/special team coordinator Darren Rizzi the interim head coach.
