Kellen Moore Drops Honest Opinion on Saints' Struggling Rushing Attack

There is really no way around it: The New Orleans Saints have a poor running game. That much seems evident after the team ran for just over a yard per carry against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday.

The Saints lost that game 16-10, but not for lack of effort in the passing game. Starting quarterback Tyler Shough completed just under 79% of his passes for 278 passing yards. It still wasn't enough to generate enough offense.

With the position under scrutiny, questions are being asked about what is going on at running back this week.

Saints head coach Kellen Moore gave his honest evaluation of his team's running game. Here is some of what he had to say about the lack of production at the position after Sunday's game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

"Yeah, obviously, we have a bye week, we have to put a lot of work into it. Because, again, there's just too much ebbs and flows. There's weeks where it's good and there's weeks where it's not. And we just weren't able to get any movement. And creating increases in the opportunities in the run game . 17 for 18. Tyler's got a couple scrambles in there, and so it wasn't good enough. We had to throw the ball a number of times, and we gotta get it done.

I think we just have to, we really have to dig in to it from step one. Evaluate the whole season as a whole and find solutions. So the main focus is gonna be the running game, right? I think certainly that's an important aspect of this thing. When you have a day like today, 17 runs for 18 yards, it's gonna be hard to win football games doing that. And so while there's some other things, I think we're real positive for our football team. We weren't able to get that done."

Could it be as simple as the Saints haven't had their two best running backs due to injury? That seems like a plausible explanation.

The Saints spent big to bring in star running back Travis Etienne on the heels of a 1,000-yard season with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Etienne got hurt, and then Alvin Kamara got injured as well.

Still, the Saints can't make excuses for the lack of production. They will need to find it elsewhere.

We'll monitor what solutions are found by Moore and company over the next few weeks.