Could the Saints’ quiet free agency extend to next year? Mickey Loomis gives an idea. (2024)

ORLANDO, Fla. — The first few questions that Mickey Loomis faced were obvious when the New Orleans Saints general manager met with reporters Monday at the NFL’s owners’ meetings.

The topic centered around the newly acquired Chase Young, his health and what went into signing the defensive end to a one-year, $13 million deal despite knowing he needed neck surgery. Not surprisingly, Loomis said the Saints did due diligence on the injury, are optimistic about his recovery and are “excited to have him.”

Beyond that ... Loomis’ session was a fitting reflection of how the Saints have spent most of free agency: It was quiet.

The Saints have done over a dozen deals in the past few weeks, but only Young might be considered a conventional splash. The other moves ranged from in-house restructures to get cap-compliant to low-risk, bargain-bin signings to fill out the roster with veteran additions.

The approach is what the Saints needed to get a cleaner cap sheet, Loomis said. And that remains a work in progress.

Loomis said he liked the strides New Orleans has made, but indicated the team’s quiet free agency may extend to next year, as well. The executive added there are a lot of variables involved — none more important than how the team performs in 2024 — but as of now, the Saints have a plan and want to see it through.

“We're in that mode right now,” Loomis said when asked if the Saints were trying to clean their cap situation. “We've got to recover from some of the things that happened with COVID and the contracts that we did in the past. And so (we’re) not as active in free agency maybe as we'd like to be at times. And look, I think we're probably going to be in that mode for another year or so.”

The Saints have faced an annual task of reworking contracts to get under the salary cap and still be aggressive enough to make significant improvements, dating back to when they decided to go all in and capitalize on former quarterback Drew Brees’ remaining years.

But that strategy, as Loomis has often referenced, hit a snag in 2021 when the pandemic forced the NFL to decrease its salary cap by 8%. The regression — more than a $20 million difference in what the Saints were expecting based on how the cap had been increasing on a yearly basis — caused the Saints to restructure contracts it might not have otherwise touched, which in turn pushed money into the future.

This year, the Saints didn’t face as daunting of a task to get cap compliant. The NFL raised its salary cap to $255.4 million — an unprecedented jump of 30% that proved to be a big boost to New Orleans.

As part of that adjustment, the Saints were able to get players to agree to pay cuts and new contracts rather than just focusing on restructures. Safety Tyrann Mathieu, linebacker Demario Davis, guard James Hurst and tackle Ryan Ramczyk all agreed to lower salaries for 2024 — although some of those deals also were favorable to the player. Mathieu, for instance, received a $5 million signing bonus and another year on his contract as part of his reworked deal.

“All these things are not independent of each other,” said Loomis, who told reporters he’d leave “no stone unturned” to improve the Saints. “They're all connected. It's a big puzzle. And that's what makes it complicated. Any one of these individual deals are not complicated, but piecing it all together and having it planned out for a period of time, two or three years out, that's what gets complicated.”