Well, what do you know? The Saints are hiring a new head coach after all.

That was probably the plan all along.

So a big Who Dat to you, Kellen Moore — and, for this job, Who Dat is meant in a friendly way, needing no question mark.

Even if he wasn’t exactly a household name before his Eagles days — that’s the team he was offensive coordinator of apparently — used his play-calling to win the Super Bowl in the very same Superdome that he will soon be prowling the sideline.

Finally.

The Saints just took their sweet time about it, armed with the convenient excuse that their top candidate all along was preoccupied with the ultimate game.

The NFL has semi-strict rules against tampering with those coaches still involved with the postseason.

A likely story, especially when it was starting to look like they might have to put a Help Wanted ad in the newspapers.

In the end it won’t really matter if Moore was their third, fourth, fifth or ninth choice.

Just win.

Never mind that there didn’t seem to be a mad stampede to New Orleans to take the job, at least not among the biggest names out there.

The biggest affront to the Saints was when one of their presumed top targets, Aaron Glenn, then the Lions defensive coordinator, opted to jump on board to lead what looks like the league’s most dysfunctional dumpster fire, the New York Jets.

Glenn played for both the Jets and Saints, so it wasn’t a blind taste test for him.

Moore is not the kind of hire that, even in New Orleans, will provoke much dancing in the French Quarter. Certainly not another parade.

You have to give him a chance. Maybe it will work out.

It is Moore’s first head coaching job, of course, and he’ll be the youngest coach in the NFL at 36.

Not that that’s important. It only matters if he fails.

You can look it up. All the greats had a first-ever head coaching job at some point.

There’s nothing to suggest that Moore can’t do it. But the best thing that we know about him right now is that he is not Dennis Allen, who was mercifully canned in the midseason.

You just wondered how long the “search” might have to last before interim Darren Rizzi got an honest shot. And Rizzi wouldn’t be a bad choice if Moore is looking to keep some of the old staff around.

For those who wanted Jon Gruden, historians will note that the Saints haven’t fared well with proven, big-name coaches.

And it has certainly been tried — mostly while the erstwhile Aints were wandering aimlessly through the NFL, usually losing and looking lost doing it.

Every few hires, it seemed, the Aints would pull something famous out of the hat. It would get everybody thinking football Mardi Gras was just around the corner.

False alarms, all of them.

The frustrations of the erstwhile Aints turned the likes of Hank Stram, Bum Phillips and Mike Ditka into shadows of their former genius. Their Saints experiences left them wondering why they ever got back into coaching, although Iron Mike’s golf handicap probably did improve significantly during his tenure.

The closest thing was probably Jim “Playoffs, Playoffs” Mora — and even his bona fides were from off-Broadway. He won two USFL championships before finally, at long last, he got the Saints into their first-ever postseasons.

If you’re looking for an optimistic parallel to Moore, however, then look no further than Sean Payton, the Saints’ head coach who, for now, all others will be compared to.

At least until they bring home a Super Bowl ring.

Payton had no head coaching experience either but was probably a bigger “rising star” among assistants than Moore is coming in.

But there are no guarantees. For every Payton in New Orleans, there’s been a whole bunch of Dick Nolans and John Norths, an occasional Tom Fears and the random J.D. Roberts, all long and justifiably forgotten by gridiron history.

Moore, like Payton, is a former quarterback.

But if Moore wants to follow the Payton path to the Super Bowl, the first thing he needs to emulate is to have a Drew Brees fall into his lap.

a

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com