John Benton doesn’t act like a guy who has his hands full.
The New Orleans Saints’ genial offensive line coach is quick with a smile and a quip.
Spend five minutes talking to the burly, 60-year-old Colorado native, and you’d never know the massive challenge he faces this season.
But here’s what here’s the daunting situation that greeted Benton in his first season as Saints offensive line coach:
His most accomplished player, starting right tackle Ryan Ramczyk, is sidelined indefinitely by a chronic knee condition.
Ramczyk's projected replacement, Trevor Penning, has not taken an official snap at the position in the NFL and played so poorly at left tackle a year ago he was unceremoniously benched in favor of a veteran journeyman signed halfway through the season.
Meanwhile, starting left tackle Andrus Peat left in free agency for the Raiders.
His projected replacement, Taliese Fuaga, is a rookie who hasn’t played left tackle since high school.
Benton's starting left guard remains unidentified from a collection of journeymen and unproven young players.
The only known commodities are center Erik McCoy and right guard Cesar Ruiz, and Ruiz is coming off the worst season of his career, according to Pro Football Focus.
The Saints offensive line graded in the bottom eight of the league in pass blocking and run blocking last year and didn’t have a single lineman ranked among the top 10 at his position.
Yet, despite all the red flares, the amiable Benton likes what he’s seen so far.
“The talent is there,” Benton said. “It’s a good (offensive line) group to start with. You have an established running back (Alvin Kamara), you've got an established quarterback (Derek Carr) and smart guys. I think it's a good situation.”
Time will tell.
Priority No. 1 for Benton and the rest of the offensive staff will be improving the Saints’ anemic rushing attack, which has seen its productivity and efficiency decline annually since 2020. The Saints ranked No. 21st in the league with an average of 102.5 rushing yards a game. Their average of 3.63 yards per carry ranked second to last.
New offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak was hired, in large part, because of his familiarity and affiliation with the Shanahan offense, which emphasizes the wide zone running game and complementary play-action passing attack.
“I don’t think overall we ran the ball nearly as well last year as we needed to, and that’s an ‘us’ thing,” Saints head coach Dennis Allen said.
Maybe so. But the responsibility will fall primarily on the shoulders of Benton and his band of big uglies up front.
The Saints are the seventh NFL stop in Benton’s 38-year coaching career. His relationship with Kubiak goes back decades, to the mid-1990s when he was coaching the offensive line at Colorado State and Klint’s father, Gary, was serving as the offensive coordinator on Mike Shanahan’s Denver Broncos staffs.
Benton learned the rudiments of the wide-zone running scheme from legendary Broncos offensive line coach Alex Gibbs and has been teaching it ever since.
The new scheme asks linemen to beat defenders to spots and cut off pursuit angles rather than simply overpower them at the point of attack. So agility, speed and athleticism are highly valued traits, and in that regard, Benton believes he has plenty of good clay to mold.
“The personnel matches the scheme,” he said. “We’ve got guys that are more than capable of doing what we need to do.”
This is Benton’s second stint in New Orleans.
His first occurred as a player 37 years ago, when he played for the Saints as a rookie replacement player during the 1987 strike.
Benton went undrafted out of Colorado State and harbored no illusions of an NFL playing career. He was serving his first coaching stint as a graduate assistant strength coach at CSU and remembers being extremely surprised — and extremely hungover — when he received the call from the Saints to join the team. Four hours later, he was “landing at the airport (in New Orleans), not knowing what was going on.”
Benson’s locker was given a locker next to star receiver Eric Martin, one of a handful of Saints veterans who crossed the picket line, but he never got into a game. He was inactive for all three contests and essentially served as, in his words, “practice slaughter” for what amounted to his monthlong NFL playing career.
While Benton was only in town for a few weeks, the experience had direct and positive effect on his life. He became friends with roommate Joe DeForest and fellow Saints lineman James Campen, both of which went on to longtime coaching careers.
Away from the field, Benton remembers spending most of his free time at a seafood restaurant near the Kenner hotel where he lived at the corner of Airline Drive and Williams Boulevard.
“They had a dozen oysters for $4, and I bet ya I ate 5,000 oysters in a month,” he quipped.
There was another silver lining.
When the Saints made their first-ever playoff appearance later that season, Benton received a bonus check in the mail that February. With the surprise windfall, Benton, who was living off a meager grad assistant’s salary, treated his buddies to a night out in Fort Collins, Colorado. He spied a waitress at the bar, and his buddies dared him to ask her for a date. He did. John and Nicole Benton eventually married and now have two daughters, Gabrielle and Paige.
“It turned out to be a really good deal,” Benton said with a smile.
The Saints are hoping Benton can work similar magic with the team’s offensive line.