Dennis Allen under fire as New Orleans head coach with 49ers up next

Taysom Hill said the strangest thing Monday when assessing a 27-20 win by the New Orleans Saints against the Los Angeles Rams.

“I think this week there may have been a more added emphasis on going out to win the football game, like, what do we have to lose?” Hill told reporters on a teleconference. “Let’s call everything on the call sheet. Let’s push the ball down the field. I would say that was maybe emphasized a little more than in weeks past.”

Emphasizing winning. Now there’s a thought. Hey, whatever works. New Orleans will bring that mindset and a 4-7 record to Levi’s Stadium as the 49ers open a three-game homestand Sunday with a 6-4 record following a 38-10 win over the Arizona Cardinals.

The Press Democrat’s Inside the 49ers blog

Not much was going well for the Saints and head coach Dennis Allen for the previous five weeks, other than a 24-0 win over Allen’s former team, the Las Vegas Raiders, in Week 8.

Before beating the fading Rams, the 3-7 start for the Saints was the worst since opening 2-8 in 2005 under Jim Haslett with Aaron Brooks at quarterback. New Orleans hired Sean Payton and signed Drew Brees in 2006, moves which led to nine playoff berths as well as a Super Bowl championship.

Brees retired after the 2020 season and Payton coaxed a 9-8 season without him in 2021 before stepping away for a season to cherry-pick his next job. Allen, who was the Saints’ defensive coordinator for six years after being fired by the Raiders, has stepped into another difficult situation.

Allen was 8-28 with the Raiders before an in-season firing in 2014 after a listless performance in a 38-14 loss in London to the Miami Dolphins. The team was cap-strapped and had little talent. Allen was hired by GM Reggie McKenzie but was never a favorite of owner Mark Davis.

Saints fans, unaccustomed to losing in the Brees-Payton years, have already launched a petition on change.org to have Allen fired.

Allen sounds much as he did with the Raiders — humorless, stoic and outwardly professing belief in himself and his team in the face of a bevy of injuries and uncertainty at quarterback. (More on that later).

“I thought our guys went out there and played and competed and won a game, so that was obviously encouraging,” Allen said told reporters Monday.

He pushed back slightly on Hill’s assessment of emptying the playbook.

“You put together a plan you think is going to work,” Allen said. “I don’t think we looked at it any differently and said we have to throw caution to the wind and try a bunch of crap and see if it works. We put a plan together we felt could be effective and overall it was.”

A look at how Sunday’s matchup breaks down:

Reasons for 49ers optimism

Saints’ QB roulette: The old saying is that if you have two quarterbacks, then you have no quarterbacks. New Orleans utilized two quarterbacks — Hill and veteran Andy Dalton — in the win over the Rams.

On one drive, which covered 49 yards in seven plays and resulted in a touchdown, the Saints went Dalton, Hill, Hill, Dalton, Dalton, Hill and Dalton. It ended with a 7-yard touchdown pass from Dalton to tight end Juwan Johnson.

Hill is a tight end/running back who is more runner than passer. And Dalton went 21 of 25 for 260 yards against the Rams. He played 40 of 57 snaps. Hill played 24 and seven times they were on the field at the same time.

That doesn’t even include Jameis Winston, who believes some sort of unwritten rule was broken when he lost his job to injury, unaware that it happened to Drew Bledsoe (Tom Brady) and Alex Smith (Colin Kaepernick) just to name two.

Defending Kamara: Running back Alvin Kamara is the Saints’ most consistent threat, and the 49ers are giving up just 3.4 yards per carry.

The 49ers concentrated their efforts on Austin Ekeler against the Los Angeles Chargers Nov. 13 — Ekeler is in Kamara’s league as a runner-receiver — and pretty much took him out of the game.

There aren’t two linebackers on the same team with the kind of range found in Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw, and Azeez Al-Shaair is no slouch, either.

Feeding all those mouths: Tight end George Kittle has refuted the notion the 49ers’ offense has “too many mouths to feed” and the 49ers served notice in the Cardinals game that coach Kyle Shanahan was capable of making it work.

On the 49ers’ first scoring drive against Arizona, covering 82 yards, the ball distribution went like this: Deebo Samuel, Christian McCaffrey, Kittle, McCaffrey, Samuel, McCaffrey, Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk.

It won’t always be like this. Sometimes a player may get frozen out, only to step up in another game while another player takes a step back. But it can be done.

Reasons for 49ers pessimism

Road weary: Shanahan is fond of talking about the “science people” who help make the kind of decisions that sent them to Colorado Springs before Mexico City to get used to the altitude. Or those who have had them stay on the East Coast between back-to-back games in that time zone.

Not sure what kind of science is involved here, but it’s hard to imagine that going from a freezing practice locale at altitude to a 70-plus-degree night in Mexico City before returning home is a good thing.

Especially when that game is on a Monday night, the 49ers got back at 6:30 a.m. and then immediately turned their attention to a less-than-fearsome New Orleans team at the start of a three-game home swing that includes Miami and Tampa Bay.

Unexplained letdown: A year ago, the 49ers had righted the ship with a three-game winning streak, only to travel to Seattle and lose 30-23 to the Seahawks in Week 13, evening their record to 6-6.

The 49ers led 23-14 in the second quarter and 23-21 at halftime but were shut out. Seattle got the scoring started with a 73-yard run on a fake punt by Travis Homer. The Seahawks would finish 7-10.

In 2019, the 49ers beat New Orleans in a wild 48-46 road win to improve to 11-2, then came home to host the Atlanta Falcons.

The Falcons won 29-22 in a game where the 49ers were either overconfident or still coming off the high of beating New Orleans. Maybe both. Maybe neither. The 49ers went on to finish 13-3 and win the NFC championship. The Falcons finished 7-9.

It happens.

Jimmy G throws a pick: Jimmy Garoppolo is at the top of his game for the 49ers, playing the best he’s ever played. He hasn’t turned the ball over in the current three-game win streak.

But if Garoppolo were to revert to “Bad Jimmy” or even “Average Jimmy” when it comes to taking care of the ball, the result could be much different.

The 49ers are 6-0 when Garoppolo doesn’t throw an interception this season and 0-3 when he does.