New Orleans Has More Fantasy Value Than Fantasy Excitement

The New Orleans Saints spent most of 2025 being exactly the football team fantasy managers thought they were.

Bad offense. Bad record. Quarterback uncertainty. Alvin Kamara getting older. The sort of team you scroll past in August unless Chris Olave happens to be sitting there looking lonely.

After 12 games, New Orleans was 2–10.

Then something inconvenient happened.

The Saints started scoring.

They won four straight games in December. Tyler Shough started looking like an actual NFL quarterback. Olave had the best season of his career. Over their final five games, New Orleans averaged 24.8 points per game.

The AutoDraftYears model projects them to score 24.5 in 2026.

Wait.

Are we sure the model is predicting a breakout?

Or is the market still pricing the wrong version of the Saints?

What Actually Happened in 2025?

Calling New Orleans a bad offense last season is perfectly reasonable.

It is also incomplete.

The Saints finished 6–11 and scored 18.0 points per game, 28th in the NFL. But that final record contains two fairly different seasons stitched together with the elegance of an airport delay.

New Orleans entered Kellen Moore's first season without the quarterback it expected to have. Derek Carr retired in May after doctors found significant degenerative changes and a labral tear in his throwing shoulder. The Saints had already drafted Shough 40th overall, leaving him and Spencer Rattler to inherit the offense.

Rattler opened the season as the starter.

New Orleans went 1–7 in his starts.

Shough took over in Week 9.

The rookie went 5–4 as a starter, completed 67.6% of his passes and threw for 2,384 yards with 10 touchdowns and six interceptions. He became the first Saints rookie since 1981 to win a start, then later became the first NFL rookie since C.J. Stroud to post consecutive 300-yard passing games.

This did not immediately turn New Orleans into an offensive amusement park.

Shough's first start produced 10 points.

The next month included another 10-point game and a 17-point loss to Miami.

Progress is rarely considerate enough to occur in a straight line.

But by December, something changed.

New Orleans scored 24, 20, 29 and 34 points during a four-game winning streak before losing the finale 19–17. Shough threw for 308 yards against the Jets and 333 against Tennessee.

And Olave looked like Olave again.

After an injury-shortened 2024, he played 16 games and set career highs with 100 receptions, 1,163 yards and nine touchdowns, earning second-team All-Pro honors.

The backfield went the other direction.

Kamara battled knee and ankle injuries, played only 11 games and finished with career lows of 471 rushing yards, 186 receiving yards and one rushing touchdown.

So the 18.0-point season was real.

But so was the late improvement.

That distinction matters.

New Orleans Actually Tried to Fix the Problems

The Saints did not spend the offseason staring lovingly at their 28th-ranked scoring offense and deciding everything was fine.

They signed Travis Etienne to a four-year, $52 million contract after he rushed for 1,107 yards and scored 13 total touchdowns for Jacksonville in 2025.

They also used the eighth overall pick on Arizona State receiver Jordyn Tyson.

That second move is especially interesting because New Orleans produced only 33 completions of 20-plus yards last season, second-fewest in the NFL.

Etienne adds another proven weapon.

Tyson adds explosiveness.

Shough gets an offseason as the guy rather than the rookie who was handed the keys while the car was already moving.

Suddenly the offensive improvement forecast requires slightly less imagination.

What Does the Model Think Happens Next?

AutoDraftYears projects New Orleans at 24.5 points per game, 12th in the NFL.

Last year: 18.0.

That is a massive 6.5-point jump.

But remember the final five games:

24.8 points per game.

The model is basically betting that late-season New Orleans was closer to the beginning of something than a meaningless December hallucination.

The projected positional environments look similarly optimistic:

Comparable offenses to New Orleans' projected profile have produced 2.9 fantasy starters on average.

Bear case: 2.

Base case: 3.

Bull case: 4.

So yes.

The model likes New Orleans.

A lot.

There is just one small problem.

The Saints Are Undervalued. Their Players Aren't.

This is where fantasy football becomes annoying.

The market ranks the Saints' fantasy roster 25th.

The model ranks it 2nd.

That's a 23-place disagreement.

Normally I see something like that and start looking for the player everyone has forgotten.

A sleeper.

A breakout.

Some poor soul being drafted in Round 12 while my spreadsheet quietly taps me on the shoulder.

Instead I get this:

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 5, RB 15, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

Not one buy.

We have somehow located a sale where nothing is on clearance.

Olave Looks Better Than His Price Looks Cheap

Olave is the easiest Saint for me to draft.

The market has him WR12.

The model has him WR9.

His adjusted edge of +7 falls short of the +11 needed for an official WR buy signal.

That's okay.

Not every draft decision needs a flashing green button.

Olave already produced 100 catches and nine touchdowns inside the broken version of this offense. Now the model expects more scoring, a better quarterback environment and another legitimate receiver pulling defensive attention.

I'm not reaching for him.

But if I'm choosing between Olave and another receiver in the same range, New Orleans' team projection absolutely matters.

That's what environment data is supposed to do.

Etienne Is Good. Everybody Knows.

Etienne goes around pick 43 as RB22.

The model has him RB17 with a projected Role Score of 81 and the NFL's ninth-best running-back environment.

That is a profile I like.

It's also approximately what the market is charging.

One correction from the original framing matters here: Etienne hasn't simply “replaced Kamara.” New Orleans has publicly talked about using both, and Kamara reworked his contract in July to remain with the team for 2026.

Etienne is clearly the more valuable fantasy asset according to the model.

That does not make the backfield his alone.

RB22 feels reasonable.

Not exciting.

Reasonable.

Fantasy football does occasionally permit this.

Shough Is the Player I Keep Coming Back To

Shough might be the most interesting Saint.

Market: QB20.

Model: QB11.

His adjusted edge is +6, barely missing the +7 quarterback buy threshold.

That is almost comically inconvenient.

But here's where the 2025 context matters.

If Shough were simply a second-year quarterback attached to a model projection, I would shrug.

He isn't.

We watched New Orleans improve after he took over.

We watched him win five of nine starts.

We watched the offense average almost exactly the model's 2026 scoring projection over its final five games.

That doesn't prove anything.

December wins against bad teams do not become more predictive because I would enjoy drafting the quarterback.

But it gives the projection a plausible football foundation.

Shough is not someone I need to draft.

He is absolutely someone I want on the late-QB list.

What Should Fantasy Managers Actually Do?

The Saints are a tiebreaker offense.

That's the practical conclusion.

I would be slightly more willing to draft Olave at WR12 because I think his surrounding environment is better than the Saints' 6–11 record suggests.

Same with Etienne at RB22.

I would keep Shough firmly in the late-round quarterback conversation.

I would not push Jordyn Tyson above his price simply because New Orleans drafted him eighth overall.

And I definitely would not force a sleeper onto this roster because the team-level model demands that somebody must be one.

Sometimes a model finds an undervalued player.

Sometimes it finds an undervalued situation.

Those are different things.

New Orleans looks like the second.

And the number I'm watching in September is simple: points.

If the Saints are hanging around 24 or 25 per game, the model probably saw the late-2025 improvement correctly.

If we're three weeks into another collection of 16–13 football games wondering why we voluntarily became emotionally invested in the Saints offense again?

Well.

The restaurant may still be underpriced.

I'm just not ordering dessert.

Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.