New Orleans Saints

New Orleans Saints Free Agency: Waste Management

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 7:52 p.m. ET

Fansided, Dean Mullen/FanSided via Who Dat Dish

Economic joy and happiness must be a new feeling coming into the 2017 season. The Saints are finally out of salary cap hell. Finally, there is cash in the wallet. However, can we trust the front office to distribute the funds?

There’s no one word to describe the cap situation the last few years. Waste is the best word that comes to mind. One of the definitions of waste is: Use or expend carelessly, or to no purpose. Furthermore, here are are synonyms as well: squander, misspend, and misuse. Surely the point is made that the salary cap has been a complete disaster in recent years.

Here is an article written at the beginning of the season in 2016 by Jason Fitzgerald from Sportingnews.com. In it, the article just touches on the recent disasters of the Saints’ salary cap. This one section explains how the cap got so incredibly wrecked.

“The Saints salary cap problems began a few years ago when they started using large signing bonuses to maintain most of their roster for their 2010 Super Bowl team, while at the same time showing little financial restraint in free agency. To do that they would convert salary, which counts in full on the cap in a given year, to a prorated signing bonus that is spread out over the contract. When a player is released, all the prorated money assigned to the future accelerates onto the cap.”

What all that means is that the Saints really made a mess of things. Loomis has to take accountability for these moves. Who Dat Nation is smart enough to figure out what waste is. It’s the definition of the 2014-16′ seasons.

So the good news is those days are over thankfully. The Saints will have a lot of flexibility in 2017 to start fresh to a certain point. Regardless, it’s just time to move on. That being said, the question still remains what happened? Did the numbers come from adding from an abacus? or perhaps they missed a few commas or zeros. No one will never know exactly what transpired.

Either way the plan didn’t pan out. So now, the 2017 free agency season is coming yet again. Just a week ago, the Saints canned five coaches on their staff to show that this time will be different. This year means business. Ironically, some of those same coaches could have still been here, if the cap was managed correctly. The coaches that were spared though were held accountable.

My question is who does Mickey Loomis answer to? Does he admit any accountability on his end? Maybe he can explain. For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be any pressure to find out from his standpoint. Now, Who Dat Nation has no choice but to put full trust into Loomis again to get it right this time around. The risk seems shaky at best. The fans will have to put faith into a front office that got the Saints into trouble in the first place, but it is what it is.