New Orleans currently is scheduled to draft nine players: A first rounder (No. 9 overall), a second (No. 40), two thirds (71 and 93), two fourths (112 and 131), a sixth (184) and two sevenths (248 and 254).<\/a><\/p>\n“I don’t think the draft approach for us is any different than it would be in any year,” Loomis said. “We’re looking for as many good players, great players, as we can find and we’re fortunate enough this year to have multiple picks in the first four rounds. And we’re excited about that because I think there’s some depth in this draft that we’ll be able to help our roster.<\/p>\n
“For us, if we’re picking in the top 10 we’re looking for somebody that, man, we’re going to count on this guy for the next eight to 10 years. And he’s going to fill that spot and we’re not going to have to worry about it. For me, that’s a goal.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes that might be a home run, a perennial Pro Bowl player, but sometimes it might be a guy that’s just, we can sleep at night because we’ve got that position covered for the next eight to 10 years.”<\/p>\n
A player’s position will not prevent him from being drafted if the team already has an established player there, though that has been an infrequent occurrence.<\/p>\n
“We’re always looking for the best player we can get wherever we’re drafting,” Loomis said. “More often than not, when you’re on the clock, you’ve got two or three players that are all graded roughly the same, and then you go to, which of these positions fits us at that time.<\/p>\n
“Every once in a while, there’s just a guy out there that’s so far graded above everyone else that, ‘We’ve just got to take this guy.’ That’s happened to us. It happened to us when (running back) Deuce McAllister was drafted (in 2001); we had Ricky Williams, we had a really good running back. And yet, (McAllister’s) grade was just so much greater than anyone else that was on the board, (and) we took him. Best available player.<\/p>\n
“That happened with (defensive end) Will Smith (in 2004), as I recall. More often, though, we’ve got two or three guys in a cloud, they’re all graded roughly the same \u2013 have the same opinion about them \u2013 and then you’re just sorting out by position at that point.”<\/p>\n
Loomis said the number of early picks the Saints have provides the opportunity for early impact.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got a first-round pick, a second-round pick, two thirds and two fourths,” he said. “I feel really good about that, because I think we’ll get good players in all of those spots. The last time we had this many picks in the first four rounds I think was 2017, and that was a pretty good draft.<\/p>\n
“I hope we have the same issue, with four years later we’re trying to keep these guys and we can’t keep them all. I hope that’s the issue, that they’re all good players and that it becomes difficult to keep them all.”<\/p>\n
He said that though he hasn’t specifically quantified the numbers, it appears there are more defensive linemen in the draft worthy of being picked in the second and third rounds than previous years, and fewer cornerbacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“We like (Rattler and Haener) as prospects. We like them. (But) I think all teams are in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076],"tags":[39,11114,19,7,81,574,896,55,2572,2571,3051,6,397],"class_list":{"0":"post-25050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-orleans-saints","8":"tag-2025-draft","9":"tag-coach-executives","10":"tag-draft","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-latest-news","13":"tag-mickey-loomis","14":"tag-new-orleans","15":"tag-new-orleans-saints","16":"tag-neworleans","17":"tag-neworleanssaints","18":"tag-news-john-deshazier","19":"tag-nfl","20":"tag-saints"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114453865142958510","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}