New Orleans Saints general manager Mickey Loomis said in a radio interview Tuesday night there was “pressure and stress on the organization” to fire Dennis Allen this week and said that Allen remains a “fantastic football coach” despite his dismissal, Matthew Paras of NOLA.com reports.

Speaking to WWL-AM a day after the Saints fired Allen, Loomis blamed the “circumstances” that “created” the team’s 2-7 record — later pointing to the “abnormal” amount of injuries that included starting quarterback Derek Carr.

“That’s just the truth, and a lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Loomis said.

Loomis did not indicate whether he agreed with the decision to fire Allen, nor was he asked whether owner Gayle Benson overruled him. In statements Monday, Benson said firing Allen was a decision “I felt we needed to make,” while Loomis issued a staunch defense of the coach and said he would be "missed." Allen went 18-25 in his two-plus seasons coaching the Saints. 

During his interview, Loomis took more of an issue with how Allen’s team was characterized as undisciplined. He pointed to a recent column by the Times-Picayune’s Jeff Duncan, which spotlighted how Saints players were told to stop parking in a lot reserved for the public and rather to park in the team-designated lot nearby.

“I mean, we get silly things written, like, ah, the players aren’t parking in the right spots,” Loomis said. “I mean, that’s ridiculous. Players have been parking out there for the last 15 years, you know, because we’ve got construction going on. We’ve got 100 more employees than we had 10 years ago. That’s just silly, and to equate that with discipline is silly, too."

“I mean, we’re the eighth — going into this last game we were the eighth-fewest penalties in the league. That’s more of a comment on discipline than where a player parks, for crying out loud.”

The executive then pivoted to blaming the team’s injuries, which he has frequently done over the course of the Saints’ seven-game losing streak.

“It just gets right back to what stares at you right in the face is that we’ve had an abnormal amount of injuries, including to our quarterback, and we haven’t been able to overcome that, and so that puts pressure and stress on the organization and ultimately it was cause for a change,” Loomis said.

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