The New Orleans Saints lost a part of their coaching staff earlier this year when LSU Tigers head coach Ed Orgeron poached Joe Brady, who had worked as an offensive assistant in New Orleans since 2017. Brady joined Orgeron’s staff as a passing game coordinator after wowing the Tigers during a consulting visit along with Saints offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr.
“He started talking and he captured their attention right away just with his ability to communicate,” Carmichael told Bruce Feldman of The Athletic. “You could tell the knowledge of what he had, from where he came from being at Penn State. Everybody in that room was taking notes.”
Brady’s last stop before New Orleans came at Penn State, where he served as a grad assistant. He helped work with then-Nittany Lions offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead, now the head coach of Orgeron’s SEC West-rival Mississippi State Bulldogs. Feldman reports that when Moorhead heard of Brady getting hired by LSU, he made a personal call to congratulate Orgeron on the addition.
But the Tigers didn’t hire him based off who he knew. Brady brought a breath of fresh air to LSU after learning from Carmichael, Saints head coach Sean Payton, quarterback Drew Brees, and the other bright minds on their staff. One of his responsibilities was meeting up with Payton to study a weekly game film cut-up of scoring plays from around the league, taking notes on which playcalls were giving NFL defenses fits.
Brady used that exposure to build his own playbook of sorts, sampling innovative formations and personnel groupings from the Saints as well as their NFL opponents — and what he’d seen in college at Penn State. Since joining the Tigers, he’s installed an offense flush with empty-backfield and shotgun sets, motion before the snap, as well as a few run-pass option plays. It’s all designed to get athletic playmakers moving from unexpected alignments. He’s even switched the terminology to a system more-similar to what the Saints have used.
It’s a far cry from the offense familiar to most LSU fans, which relied on a hard-nosed running attack that was too-often shut down against elite defenses like the Alabama Crimson Tide. For a program that frequently earns top recruiting honors and puts Pro Bowl receiving talents like Odell Beckham Jr. and Jarvis Landry into the NFL, the Tigers have struggled to move the ball in the past.
And the changes are reflected in LSU’s locker room. “He’s a game-changer,” Orgeron said to Feldman. “I like his presentation, the way he handles himself. It’s the confidence he has and all of the coaches have in him. I see it in the players too now. They walk around with a bounce in their step.”
Whether Brady’s innovations will immediately pay off remains to be seen, but so far everything seems to be going well. The Sean Payton coaching tree hasn’t had great success thus far, but Brady might be in prime position to turn that trend around.
