Girod Street End Zone

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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It was noted to me that among pro sports teams, only the Saints have fans who routinely organize/tweetup/whatever and go out to the airport to greet the team on flying home from any, now maybe all, mid-season road games, evocative of almost a “college-like atmosphere” around the franchise and its largely addled followers, most of whom are either numb to suffering or have short-term memory issues that make the protagonist in Memento look like the guy in charge of remembering all the Jeopardy answers.

Au contraire.  This behavior has no analog in college.  The relationship between this team and its fan base has its roots directly in what Ms. Coupee calls, imitating my accent, “hah skule.”

Nobody greets the bus in college.  But in high school, where do you go after the game?  Back to the gym to greet the team bus, where await parents, siblings, teachers and admins, friends, cheerleaders, and the occasional disturbed urban male with no apparent connection to the school or anyone in it.

We still think this whole Saints thing is high school.  We really think these guys care about us, somehow remotely close to how we feel about the whole deal, and that it means something.  While some of it is founded in the tragedy of Katrina and the hope of the aftermath, and the direct connections from the deeds and words of guys such as Brees, Payton, etc., some of this goes way back to god knows when.  I think the spirit was always there, but we just needed a little extra reason to believe, or delude ourselves, whatever explanation works for you.   There is a level of naive affection for these guys beyond simple wins and losses that to me defies most other explanations.

Look, as a realist, I know these guys line up for pay, and small amounts of money moves great loyalties at free agency time because we’re not chipping in for their bass boats when they turn 50, but as that same realist I also can’t help but think that the simple manipulations that subtly sway human emotions in so many other contexts have to apply in this one as well:  if you’re a player returning from an NFL road game in October and the streets are lined with waving people late on a Sunday night, it must be hard to escape the thought that perhaps, most other things being equal, there’s a slightly higher calling here.

That, or these people are idiots. 

I think it’s the former, that’s my story, and I am sticking to it.

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One Singer, One Song:  Cheap Trick, “Surrender.”  Yeah, so the arrangement was stolen from the Quadrophenia album.  Like so many bands, the great song written while the band labors in obscurity is a minor hit, then the A&R guy rushes you to the studio to crank out some sellable piece of crap like “I Want You To Want Me” that they sell to 57 million Japanese teenage girls.  Whatever.

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One quick takeaway from the Rams game:  Not that Pierre Thomas and Mike Bell were big slouches or anything, but Reggie Bush looked like our best back out there on pretty much every touch.  For whatever his other failings or disappointments, Bush (now tied for sixth seventh [good catch:  blue dog man] on the Saints all-time TD list, BION) still has a nose for the pylons and downmarkers that pass for a surveyor’s tools in the NFL.

Making it all the more puzzling why he didn’t touch the ball on our last three drives, each of which had a first and 10 inside the Rams 45, and resulted in our either punting or turning it over on downs.   (Now THAT is Ernie Hefferle’s Saints.)  Running out the clock with Bell and Thomas is great, but with that kind of field position, one more score is a complete kill shot and clock grinding is infinitely easy thereafter, saving us the sweat of a final play Hail Mary.   I know hindsight is 20-20 but we needed to Finish Strong.  Just a thought.

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My quick take on le decision Belichick:  Great call, and if we’re ever in that spot, I would demand that Payton go for it and end the game on our terms (just not with a fullback trap, mind you).   When you give the ball back to a trailing opponent late, they are going for it on every fourth down, which swings the math drastically in their favor and puts an astonishing amount of pressure on your defense to make a play, three downs being considered the right number of chances to make 10 yards in the ordinary course.  Also, even assuming punting the other team back 40 yards gets accomplished, the Colts still had time for a leisurely 12-play drive, and I don’t care if the punt sent them back to within nine yards of Baltimore, if one Patriot DB lets a WR slip a tackle, he’s scoring.  It was more than defensible, it was the right call.   I love a coach who is willing to take responsibility instead of putting his defense in a no-mistake situtation, thus reserving for himself the out of blame-shifting to his players.

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As the dark clouds of mood went away by the time I heard that Tracy Porter was not only not clinically dead, but might return by the end of the season, I got it back together.  Bear in mind that a lot of our early season success was against a succession of young quarterbacks, and in the last three weeks we had seen Matt Ryan, a not-panicking Jake Delhomme, and former Pro Bowler Matt Bulger, not to mention three of the best running attacks in the league.

We’re doing ok.

We’ll do the Bucs later in the week.

And please feel free to leave comments below.

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10-4-1 last week, 79-63-2 on the year.   Vegas, baby?

GO SAINTS GO!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Matters of No Importance, The New Orleans Saints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.