In Super Bowl LIX, Kellen Moore was the offensive coordinator for the winning team, and Justin Reid played safety for the losing team. After the game, Moore was hired as head coach of the Saints, and a month later, Reid signed a free agent contract with the Saints. And Reid says he thinks his coach is building a winner.
Reid emphasized the culture that Moore is instilling from the top of the organization down, and the players are buying in.
“First and foremost, it’s culture over everything,” Reid said. “The culture that’s built here and Coach Kellen, they just won the Super Bowl last year with Philly. He brought his strength staff over and a lot of those guys are familiar with winning. We have a lot of guys here who are familiar with winning. But the great thing, because I’ve been on mediocre teams, I’ve been on bad teams, I’ve been on great teams. And the culture in this locker room is right right now. We’ve got guys that believe in the system, that buy in. We don’t have bad character guys. And that’s the first step that you need in order to build a real team to go out and win.”
Reid said Moore is demanding a lot from the players at Organized Team Activities, and that’s a good thing.
“You can feel it immediately,” Reid said. “Day one of OTAs, they ran it like a college program with the amount of conditioning and attention to detail. But I kind of like things that way. It feels more true to the sport.”
The Saints may have a Super Bowl culture, but they haven’t built a Super Bowl roster. It’s probably going to take some time for a Saints team that has been in salary cap hell to emerge as a winner, even though Reid is confident that they’re on the right track.