Jon Gruden under consideration as an addition to Saints coaching staff, sources say
The Saints are poised to make changes to their coaching staff in the wake of their poor 2023 season, and veteran NFL head coach Jon Gruden is being evaluated as a possible addition, sources revealed Monday.
Gruden, a Super Bowl-winning coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, recently visited with Saints executives on the team’s Week 17 road trip to Tampa, Florida, where Gruden owns a house. He attended a team meeting the night before the Saints’ game against the Buccaneers and dined with staff, including Loomis, at a local restaurant later that evening, sources said.
The exact nature the visit with Gruden in Tampa is unclear, but a person close with the issue indicated there is mutual interest between the parties if Gruden does not land a head coaching contract during the 2019 NFL hiring cycle.
Saints head coach Dennis Allen declined to address specifics when asked at his end-of-season press conference Monday if he will make changes to the team’s offensive coaching staff. He said he and the team’s brain trust would “look at everything” when they meet this week to analyze the 2023 season.
“I’m not going to go into any of those details in terms of what changes will occur,” Allen said during his 45-minute briefing with local reporters at the Saints’ Metairie training site. “But there’s things that will have to be different.”
Gruden likely would be an addition to the Saints offensive staff rather than a replacement for offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael or another coach in an existing capacity, the person said. The Saints made a similar move in 2015 when they hired Allen to the staff as a senior defensive assistant while Rob Ryan was defensive coordinator. Allen was promoted into the coordinator’s post 10 months later when Ryan was sacked.
Gruden attended Saints training camp in August and the team’s minicamp in May as a non-paid observer. Gruden also visited Saints training camp as an observer in 2009.
Gruden has a close relationship with quarterback Derek Carr, having coached him for three-plus seasons in Oakland/Las Vegas.
Carr passed for more than 4,000 yards in each of the four seasons he played for Gruden and had the two highest passer efficiency ratings of his career in 2019 (100.8) and 2020 (101.4).
“We always consider new ideas,” Allen said when asked if he would consider making systematic adjustments or adding new ideas to the offensive strategy this offseason. “ … I do think there’s some things that we do offensively that have proved to succeed in our league, and I think we want to preserve some of those things. And yet, I think we maybe need to look at how we can do things differently, too.”
Gruden, 60, won a Super Bowl as the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2003. His first head coaching job was with the Oakland Raiders from 1998-2001. He was traded by the Raiders to the Bucs in 2002 and served as the head coach there for seven seasons.
In 2021, he resigned as the head coach in Las Vegas after racist, sexist and homophobic emails he sent when he was an ESPN announcer were made public in news reports. The emails were written between 2011-18 to former Washington Commanders executive Bruce Allen and were discovered amid documents the league collected during an inquiry into the workplace atmosphere of the Washington football team.
Gruden has sued the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell, saying that the leaks hurt his personal reputation and destroyed his career. He is seeking monetary damages.
A hearing in the lawsuit is anticipated to be conducted in the Nevada Supreme Court on Wednesday.
