You certainly don’t need me to tell you that the New Orleans Saints are already in the deep waters this season. Winless through three weeks, New Orleans is coming off of a one-sided 31-point beatdown at the hands of the Seattle Seahawks, and when the Saints go marching into Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, New York this Sunday, it’s possible, if not likely, that the Buffalo Bills will come away with an equally dominant win.
At the center of these struggles are a first-year head coach and a second-year quarterback who, whether fair or unfair, will come to be the faces of this subpar season. Head coach Kellen Moore took his time during the offseason before naming Spencer Rattler the starting quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, and now even as the season may already be off the rails, he’s not ready to make a chance just yet.
“I think he realizes how much confidence we have in him,” Kellen Moore said of Rattler earlier this week. “He’s played a lot of good ball and I think he understands the opportunities ahead of him. It’s frustrating because Spence hasn’t been able to get a win in this league and he has earned it and deserves it. He has done so much good. We’ve got to all rally together, focus on our individual task and we’ll that done sooner rather than later.”
From that one statement, I see three notable takeaways:
1. There seems to be no thought at all that the Saints might move on from Rattler anytime soon. Rookie Tyler Shough will continue to sit on the bench for the foreseeable future.
2. Spencer Rattler has not yet come away with a win during his NFL career.
3. Kellen Moore isn’t getting caught up in Rattler’s 0-9 career record. He’s doing the proper evaluation of his quarterback’s performance and realizing that things could be a whole lot worse.
Combine those three points, and suddenly we’re on the verge of a situation where Spencer Rattler makes NFL history within the next two months.
Spencer Rattler Still Aiming For First Career Win
With a loss on Sunday, Rattler will fall to 0-10 as a starting quarterback in his NFL career, making him the first player since Deshone Kizer to lose his first ten games as a professional. Kizer would go on to finish his career with a perfectly imperfect 0-15 record, accumulated entirely during the Cleveland Browns’ winless 2017 season.
Only time will tell if Rattler eventually hits that same mark this season, but New Orleans’ schedule doesn’t provide a ton of relief or a sure-thing win over the next month and a half. A visit to Buffalo is followed by home games versus the New York Giants (and rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart) and New England Patriots, a visit to Soldier Field to face the Chicago Bears, a home tilt versus the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and a trip out west to take on the Los Angeles Rams.
If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that Rattler has actually shown flashes of solid quarterback play, specifically this season. In a Week 2 loss versus the San Francisco 49ers, Rattler finished the game with 207 passing yards, 3 touchdowns and a 118.1 passer rating… any way you shake it, this individual performance could only be viewed as a success. And when you compare the first nine starts of Rattler’s career with those of Kizer, it’s clear who the superior quarterback is:
Deshone Kizer, first nine NFL starts – 52.5% completion, 1,555 passing yards, 5 passing touchdowns, 14 interceptions, 54.0 passer rating, 45 rush attempts, 223 rushing yards, 4 rushing touchdowns, 4 fumbles lost
Spencer Rattler, first nine NFL starts – 60.5% completion, 1,956 passing yards, 8 passing touchdowns, 6 interceptions, 76.5 passer rating, 28 rush attempts, 199 rushing yards, 3 fumbles lost
The question now becomes, how long will Kellen Moore continue to believe that Spencer Rattler is the superior option in the New Orleans Saints‘ quarterback room?
Kellen Moore Backs Spencer Rattler As Second-Year QB Approaches Dubious Record