Before the season, Rob Ryan was “ready to get weird.” His defense, which relied on myriad fronts and a three-safety base package in 2013, was going to get even more experimental in 2014.

Chris Wesseling, on NFL.com:

The new idea hinges on lining up the best 11 players, with size and position decreasing in importance.

Rob Ryan himself, from the same article:

“The three-safety package comes in a lot more than it’s ever done in football. We have five really talented safeties on the roster and we plan on playing them all because they are really good players.”

From that big Wall Street Journal piece which cast the Saints as the “future” of defense:

Those inside the league say the New Orleans Saints are quietly crafting an unorthodox defense that could change the game and become the shape of defenses to come.

Two not great weeks in the year of the future of defense, though, have revealed a Saints unit so conventional that its blandness itself is weird.

Let’s take a look.

The Pretty Close to Normal 4-3

The primary Saints defense through two weeks has been the plain old 4-3. Parys Haralson, Curtis Lofton, and David Hawthorne are your linebackers. Both Cam Jordan and Junior Galette often line up as wide defensive ends. In the play below, from early during the Cleveland game, Brodrick Bunkley is a 1 technique nose tackle and Akiem Hicks is a 3 technique defensive tackle.

Jairus Byrd drops back into a cover 1 zone, usually; everybody else plays man to man, including Kenny Vaccaro, who quite often just mans up on the tight end.

This is basic stuff. It’s pretty much the defense you ran in Madden ’95.

The Boring Nickel

Last year, when writers wrote about the Saints’ nickel, they usually mean the 4-2-5 alignment in which Rob Ryan deployed his three safeties, with Kenny Vaccaro playing a kind of wildcard role, capable of acting as a safety, corner, or linebacker on a given play. Vaccaro manned, basically, the “spur” position in a 4-2-5, a do-it-all, wreck havoc and cause chaos spot around which the rest of the defense can kind of rally.

Anyway, that’s not what the Saints have done this year. Here’s their usual nickel formation.

Once again Byrd is the lone deep safety. Vaccaro is up near the line, but he’s just playing a traditional strong safety role. There are two linebackers and three cornerbacks. In general bad things have happened to the Saints in 2014 so far while they are in this formation.

The Kind of 3-4 Because Whatever

The Saints have kind of lined up in a 3-4. This is the front they opened with during Cleveland’s second offensive series. It’s really not different from the 4-3; it’s close to a true 3-4 because Bunkley has slid over from nose tackle to play 3 technique defensive tackle, and Junior Galette doesn’t have his hands down, so whatever, guess he’s a linebacker now.

Byrd is still alone deep. Vaccaro is still a plain old strong safety. This one is really just the Saints’ base 4-3 with a slight adjustment to the alignment.

Three Safeties! Except Not Really, It’s Just a Dime and We Haven’t Enough Corners

Game Rewind’s “coaches film” wouldn’t cooperate, so you’ll have to trust me on this: Here, the deep safeties are Jairus Byrd and Rafael Bush — Bush, who played only five total snaps against Cleveland, but played some more against Atlanta, probably because Atlanta spread the field so much, making the formation below often necessary.

Kenny Vaccaro is in the slot, manned up on Devin Hester. Patrick Robinson is the cornerback at the top of the image; Corey White and Keenan Lewis join Vaccaro as cornerbacks on the bottom of the image. The lone linebacker is Curtis Lofton.

This isn’t last year’s “big nickel”/4-2-5, which had two linebackers and three safeties. This is just a plain old dime defense, a generic six defensive back thing with two safeties and four corners. Kenny Vaccaro is the fourth corner, but that’s because the Saints only have three corners, really — Stanley Jean-Baptiste has been inactive in both games so far, and undrafted rookie Brian Dixon has only played special teams.

So What’s the Deal?

None of this makes sense. The Saints didn’t put much emphasis on the cornerback position during the offseason, and did put a lot of emphasis on safety, giving many dollars to Jairus Byrd and matching the offer Rafael Bush got from Atlanta. That, with all the talk of multi-safety hybrid weird revolutionary future of defense defenses, indicated Rob Ryan would deploy his personnel sort of how he did in 2013.

He hasn’t. The Saints have played three safeties only rarely, and when they have they’ve only done so because personnel groups like the Falcons’ four receiver sets forced the Saints to use four corners. That’s why Rafael Bush played a significant number of snaps against Atlanta and just five against Cleveland: Atlanta spread the field; Cleveland, which has no good receivers on its active roster right now, couldn’t.

Rob Ryan wanted to “get weird.” He did. His defense is so inexplicably plain that I’m bewildered.