Girod Street End Zone

Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

I, too, read The Goat’s trenchant analysis of the Saints’ chances in 2012. It makes sense; it is hard to imagine the Patriots winning titles without Bill Belichick, or the Giants winning without Bill Parcells.

But, and I know we stole this from somewhere, if Peyton Manning can lead a Colts team coached by a wax figure of Jim Caldwell to the Super Bowl, why can’t Drew Brees win it all in his home stadium?

Let’s review a few forgotten elements of the bidding, shall we?
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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

It’s obviously taken a little longer than usual to coalesce my thoughts, but you didn’t think we’d miss this 2012 ride, did you? 

Crazed, angry, bitter fans screaming at Saints’ opponents like enraged ex-husbands screaming at an alimony-enriched ex-wife?

Watching a real-life laboratory experiment about the relative values to the franchise of Sean Payton, Drew Brees, Pete Carmichael and a few other guys?

Seeing just how much more-traditional DC Steve Spagnuolo’s defense is more effective than Gregg Williams’s anachronistic Last Samurai approach?

We’ll be there on Sunday.  But first, a few thoughts about what’s happened, and where we’re going, and the glorious romance of a tragically doomed season.

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Tough day yesterday.

After some thinking, and with a Kid who plays football and already had one concussion, I have decided that the right thing to do is to deal with the team’s sanctions and move on.

It is difficult in football, in between the excitement of physicality and the other things that go with any kind of risk-bearing activity with which people love to challenge themselves (rock climbing, NASCAR, you name it), to balance the risk with the reward.  Nobody would (or, in world I would want to live in, should) enjoy watching something that ultimately might turn out to be more cruel than fun.  I’m not sure I could watch any game where player or participant safety was not more important than fan enjoyment. The people in charge have to draw some lines, some where, as best they can.  You might disagree with where the lines are right now, compared to where we think they’ve been in the past, but if somebody crosses a line, even a new line, there are going to be consequences.  So it goes.   Rather than worry about what’s happened, I am going to embrace the new reality of the 2012 season and move on con gusto.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

If you’ll all indulge me this once, with a nod from The Goat I am going to depart a little bit from my traditional role as GSEZ’s human football abacus and do a little more free associating.  Fan does not live by data alone.

In trying to sort through all the seething fires in my brain in the days’ aftermath from last Saturday’s loss, I kept wondering where all the anger and depression were after the shock and denial.  It’s not like I was going to send out a search party….but I couldn’t figure out why the traditional rage, the type that former DC Rick Venturi used to inspire with more reliability than a Swiss railway system, hadn’t shown up.

Yesterday, I finally settled on where I was about the 2011 Saints, and how it all finished, and where I am now:  it’s where I was the night I fell out of that tree on the eastern levee of the 17th Street canal.  And I think it’s where you should be, too.

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Gregg Williams, 2009-2011.

Ggood bye and ggood ******* riddance.   As Patronius said, the Witchh Doctorr might turn out to have been a Quackk all along.  And we can’t say we weren’t warned, either.

http://www.girodstreetendzone.com/2011/11/27/the-report-rating-your-physician-edition/

The chickens, as Malcolm X prophesied, have come home to roost.  And the best Saints team in franchise history, on the cusp of hosting the NFC championship game and heading to an indoor Super Bowl, is going to be watching from the sidelines with the rest of us, because Gregg ******* Williams just had to prove once more that pragmatism >>> ideology every time.

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Yeah, I’ll admit it.  There was one night in my life I didn’t hate the 49ers.  On January 29, 1995, the 49ers won Super Bowl XXIX 49-26 over the San Diego Chargers, and Rickey Jackson got his well-deserved Super Bowl ring.

Other than that, fuck ‘em.   The Falcons hate runs strong because we have to deal with them twice a year.  For better or worse, the 49ers, who have been pretty much irrelevant since 1998, essentially ran and hid with realignment in 2002, but we have now hunted them down.  I am looking forward to Saturday night’s game like a Russian plutocrat heading to Vegas for a four-day weekend with a suitcase full to bursting with quality blow and stacks of non-consecutive Benjamins.

-o-o-o-o-o-

 I’m sure you’re at least a little like me.  You’re so tired of hearing about the Frisco defense, you want to poke out your own eardrums, or at least stop clicking on ESPN.com more than once every 11 minutes to see if anything has happened (which it has not) or there’s any new information (which there is not).

It’s just astonishing to me that everyone is ignoring the great subplot of this game:  the Saints defense against the 49ers offense.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

Now that we have dispatched the not-ready-for-prime Detroit Lions (although not without a tip of the cap to Lions QB Matthew Stafford and to Megatron), we turn to the next order of business, a multi-purpose business trip to San Francisco, or, as we shall refer to it, Frisco, because they hate that.   Among this weekend’s to-do’s:

• survive and advance to the NFCCG;
• win our first road playoff game ever;
• exact a bit of revenge for the suffering of our ancestors in the 80s and early 90s, when we are certain that there’s no way the 49ers ever rounded the corner on any salary cap or free agency issues, because former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo is just not that kind of guy; and
• most importantly, shutting a lot of people the fuck up about how good the 49ers are, and how tough a matchup this is for the 2011 New Orleans Saints, because we are playing outside for fuck’s sake.

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

And so the second season begins.  The world of maybe one-and-done, which we thought we left behind in the John Hughes era, only to rediscover in Seattle while the 2010 team was still looking for itself in a post-Lombardi fog 11 months later.  January madness.  Win or go home.  Survive and advance.  Nurse, hand me another cliche, stat.

-o-o-o-o-o-

So where does that leave us in the opening round of the playoffs, other than seething with revenge for having the Bye, which was our Birthright, stolen from us?

We have solved Bruce Cockburn’s problem:  the lions will be right here.

I spent part of this evening struggling with buyer’s remorse, having hoped for the Packers to beat the Lions last Sunday to avoid a third game with the Falcons for the opening round of the playoffs.  Dumb, dumb, dumb of me.   Dumb.  I let my fear of the possibility, however remote, of having to deal with losing to the Falcons in the playoffs again blind me to a whole bunch of points that would have been more obvious if I hadn’t been drinking double Maker’s Mark old fashioneds all that afternoon:

1.  We own the Falcons.  We talked about this last week.  I swear that somebody told me that Falcons HC Mike Smith has a tramp stamp across his lower back that says “Sean Payton” in old English letters.   (Not sure I want to know how he knows, honestly.)  There’s not a single thing they do well enough that conflicts with anything we don’t do that well.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Corresopndent

There’s the old saw that adversity doesn’t build character, but it does reveal it.  Such is the way of the final week of the NFL season, where all the bad marriages blow up (Jets, Oakland), the wannabes get exposed a little (Lions, 49ers), and the pros tell everyone to step aside so you can see how it’s done (Packers, Saints, Patriots). 

But before we try to start picking apart playoff scenarios based on who’s hot and not, whether/how badly we beat the Lions, should we get ahead of ourselves about Frisco (because they hate being called that, sort of their version of “New Orleenz”), we wanted to take a few quick deep data dives to get a sense of the Saints.  Most of us Saints fans are doing a pretty good job of ignoring the shiny object of various individual and team records because we want the permanent legitimacy and complete redemption that only comes with a second Lombardi.  Nobody wants to be the one-and-done dynasty that wasn’t, like the 80s Bears or the Colts of the ‘aughts; the teams you remember are the multiple winners, the 49ers, the Steelers, the Cowboys, the Patriots.  THOSE are the teams that set the standard and send coaches and players to the Hall of Fame.

Meanwhile, we Saints fans have no frame of reference to gauge this current Greatness thing that’s been thrust upon us.  Last year, we looked (and we believe with great insight) into where the 2009 team fit with the Super Bowl winners of the last 10 years.  Thus, we decided to do a little digging as to how good this team is, not in any sense of premature celebration, but more for a foundation of how much swagga and steel the fan base should have starting Saturday night and hopefully all the way to a post-game victory party at St. Elmo’s.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

In the immortal word of MC Hammer:  Proper. 

There is nothing better than a beatdown of the Atlanta Falcons on national television, and then I got to wondering why this felt so particularly….good.

What I finally came to is that it’s the reverse of the feeling we’d had as Saints fans since 1967, and now we have to adjust to living in a new world.  For a real fine expression of just how new that world is, I can’t recommend this

www.moosedenied.com/we-make-the-rules-pal/

enough. Warning, there are some dirty words (gasp!), but in this case they are somewhere between “completely justified” and “sine qua non”.

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