Darren Rizzi talks Buccaneers loss, coaching candidacy, roster

The Saints did not have a player named to the initial Pro Bowl roster for the first time since 2016. Rizzi indicated he felt it was not for a lack of Pro Bowl caliber talent

“I think No. 1, I don’t think this is going to be earth-shattering news, but a lot of our best players got hurt and didn’t play complete seasons,” he said. “And a lot of times, as you know, that hurts your chances for making some of those accolades, Pro Bowl, All-Pro, all that. I mean in my opinion, Erik McCoy is one of the best centers in football. And in my opinion, there’s a guy that’s going to be a Pro Bowler and have the All-Pro votes if he stays healthy. Naturally, we lost Taysom (Hill). Alvin (Kamara), obviously missed considerable time. Rashid Shaheed, who was a Pro Bowler last year, he gets hurt. I’ll wholeheartedly agree with you that it’s a travesty with JT (Gray). I mean, JT should be first-team All-Pro and really got snubbed for the Pro Bowl, so I think there’s certainly the talent’s there. I think Alontae Taylor was having a Pro Bowl type season as an inside nickel. And for the betterment of the team, he had to move outside for the second half of the year. And that might have hurt his chances a little bit. Paulson Adebo is another guy that was on track, he had a bunch of interceptions, was on track to having a real good, productive kind of Pro Bowl year. He goes down. And so listen, we never made any excuses, and we never let the excuses factor in with our results, but I do think from a personnel side of things, I do think that did effect some of the accolades.”

The Saints sported a number of high-profile veterans alongside their younger talent. The team roster was the 16th oldest initial 53, but Rizzi pointed to young talent that the Saints can look to as they consider.

“There are a number of our marquee players and household names have gotten older. But we did play a lot of young guys this year. I mean, you look at you look at Taliese Fuaga, our starting left tackle really rarely got talked about all year, which is a credit to him because he played, had a real solid season,” he said. “There were a lot of younger guys that stepped up and had to play for us. You look at Kool-Aid (McKinstry) and you look at obviously Spencer (Rattler) had to play a bunch of snaps and there was a lot of younger guys who got thrown into the mix. So like I said, we’ll sit down, evaluate all that. I think that’s…