Girod Street End Zone

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

What’s with all the trepidation about playing the Patriots?  Yeah, yeah, I know about Belichick, and Brady, the rings, etc., etc., best passing attack in the league, should have beaten the Colts, Brady’s back from his injury, etc., and I keep coming back to the same thought:

These guys already lost three games.

No disrespect intended (I tend to save that for Atlanta), but

These guys already lost three games.

I guess if you want, you can say they’re hot, Brady’s back, and just look at the last five games.  Shall we?

Pats 59, Titans 0– A tremendous beatdown of a then 0-5 team whose kickoff coverage team ran down the field and out the back gate for the bus before the first play from scrimmage.   The Pats threw 45 times anyway.  This is the equivalent of an early-season NCAA basketball game between North Carolina and some NAIA rent-a-victim.  A big win, yes, but to be kept in perspective.

Pats 35, Bucs 7– In London, before the Bucs had switched to Josh Freeman, and not quite as stylish a beatdown as we gave them in Tampa, but we’ll call that comparison a push.

Pats 27, Dolphins 17– In Foxboro, coming off the bye, the Patriots are down by one late in the third, not icing the game until a Steve Gostkowski FG with under two minutes to play.

Colts 35, Pats 34 — A great effort by NE, and they more than deserved to win the game.  One small footnote:  Colts starting CB Marlin Jackson and FS Bob Sanders had just been put on injured reserve, and starting CB Kelvin Hayden was out with an injury.  Just sayin’.  Not to mention, they had a 31-14 lead and the Colts right where they wanted them, and couldn’t stop them.

Pats 31, Jets 14 — A revenge home win for the Pats, totally dominating the Jets out of the box and sending the Jets to their sixth loss in their last seven games.  Jets rookie QB Mark Sanchez continued his deterioration, throwing wild passes all over the lot, giving up four picks.

Where are the big wins against quality opponents?  Where is the first win, just one, in somebody else’s stadium (the “road” game against the Bucs was in London)?   Why are they 2-3 in games decided by seven points or less?

These guys are what their record says they are:  7-3.  As such, lump them with the Chargers, Bengals, Cardinals and Cowboys, good teams that are capable of beating quality opponents on the road, but don’t quite have either the talent level or the intangibles to do so consistently.  Give them Belichick-Brady Bonus points, put them at the top of that heap if you want, but don’t tell me I shouldn’t expect us to walk out of there with a solid win on Monday night.

Look, The Goat is a realist.  If they bring their A game, they may well beat us, and certainly we might go out there and shoot ourselves in the foot.  But even our letdowns have resulted in wins, and our foot-shooting episodes have lasted a series, a quarter, a half at worst.  We shook off the funk last weekend, and, to invoke Damon Runyan, the way to bet is that we are going to play our game and be 11-0 by about 11 pm local time on Monday.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

Are these your Saints?  Most of the people up here in Philly seem to think they’re mine.   If I had a case of bourbon for everybody who told me in the last month, “Hey, your Saints look pretty good,” “How about your Saints?” or ”Do you think your Saints going to win every game?” I could probably retire.  Or at least stop having to make liquor store runs for a while.

All I know is, it beats living in a different NFL city and having my team suck, which in the Coupee household is a major quality of life issue.

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I got so calm and pleased over Sunday’s 38-7  beatdown of the Bucs I almost forgot to chart my usual free-floating anxiety.  Thirty-point win, did you say?  Hmmmm.

Another rare feeling.  Until 1986, the post-Mecom era, we only had two, count ‘em, two thirty-point margin wins, both of them over Atlanta.  In the Dome Patrol era of 1986-1993, we picked up five more,  but only one in the Haslett era.   Two last year and last Sunday’s gets you a grand total of 11, or about one every four years, and Sunday’s win ties for the sixth-biggest victory margin in Saints history.

The reason would be obvious:  to win by a lot, you have to play both good offense AND good defense, and for most of our history we’d be lucky to get a sniff at either one.    The Archie era in the late 70s got us points, and the Dome Patrol got stops, but we could never put the two together….until now.

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I would be remiss if I did not use this new technology to point you to two other places you can sample internet thoughts on the Saints.  For a more Impressionist take, utilizing power pop and pop culture references out the wazoo instead of pastels and oils, I would suggest taking a look at moosedenied, and for a more traditional take, award-winning blogger Les East at neworleans.com.   Both can be found by clicking on their names above.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

A four-game division lead before Thanksgiving?  Is this right?  Us?  Is this possible? 

Damn right, but believe it or not, it’s happened before:  In 1991, the Saints were 9-1, with Atlanta at 5-5, San Fran at 4-6 and the (then LA) Rams at 3-7.  Of course, we proceeded to drop our next four games, but hung on to win the division at 11-5 while the Falcons won five of six to finish 10-6, which they needed because the 49ers, that collection of Nosferatus led by soon to be confessed criminal Eddie DeBartolo (I just love saying that), ran the table to get to 10-6 as well.  (My memory was that when Bobby Hebert went down, Steve Walsh wasn’t up to the task, and we only righted the ship when Hebert came back, but then I went and looked at their stats:  Hebert’s rating in nine games was 79.0, Walsh’s in eight games was 79.5.  Honestly, neither one was good enough to take us further.)

Still, this is the earliest we’ve ever been four games up, and with Atlanta heading up to play at the Giants on Sunday, I am feeling our first five-game lead ever.  In theory, we could clinch a playoff berth in the Monday nighter against the Patriots.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay?

HAHAHAHAHA.

Of course I’m getting ahead of myself.  To hell with it.  For once in my life, let everybody else scramble for a playoff spot while we make a Secretariat-style run for the no. 1 seed.  Meanwhile, I seek the cherry on top:  the Falcons finish 8-8 and continue their wonderful streak of never having consecutive winning seasons in their pathetic, soulless, strip-mall Applebee’s history.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

I don’t think it’s that I’m spoiled, feeling for the first 24 hours or so afterwards like the triumph was a defeat.  Sunday night, with grim determination over an eked-out win over a bottom-feeder that only cost us, oh, a critical piece of our defense as CB Tracy Porter MUST have been knocked out for the season with that knee injury, I was steeling myself for the reality that while more trouble was surely coming in the days ahead, we had bought some breathing room with a 9-0 start, and even if we ended up 13-3 with the no. 2 NFC seed, we’d have more than a puncher’s chance in an NFCCG in Minnesota in January.

But these are most assuredly not your father’s Saints, especially if your father was Ernie Hefferle.

In a miracle of Lourdesian proportions, now it turns out that Porter might well be back for the playoffs, which, if we get a first-round bye, don’t start for nine weeks.   And other key players (DT Sedrick Ellis, CB Jabari Greer, FD Darren Sharper) surely will be back no later than when the Patriots show up 12 days hence.

By then, surely, we will have shaken off this mid-season turnover funk that almost caused us to lose, my god, a game here.

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