Girod Street End Zone

The Goat
Founder GSEZ

Let’s just clear the air here.  Regular-season results are a means to an end.  There are a number of goals to this 2009 New Orleans Saints season:

• win a Super Bowl
• at least GET to a Super Bowl
• continue to build the skills and experience of the players on the roster
• continue to build on success for purposes of organizational growth and continuity

You can fill in more of your own if you’d like, but those are  mine.

A 16-0 record is great only to the extent it advances one of those goals.  At this point, it’s sort of irrelevant to the real goal this team has now: the no. 1 seed in the NFC, which IMHO is hypercritical for two big reasons and one small one:

Big reason 1.  Home field advantage through the NFC playoffs.  Spare me the stats on how home field isn’t that important in the playoffs.  It is hugely helpful to the 2009 New Orleans Saints.  At this point, what you’re talking about is playing at home vs. playing indoors in Minnesota, so it’s not like we’re outside on a cold, wet or slow field. 

For me, it’s not so much for the offense, which I truly believe can score anywhere, but for the defense.  First, we have to get the damn defense healthy, or all we’ll have is nice memories of November 2009.  Assuming good health, against a good team, I am a lot more confident in this defense playing in one of the last great home-field crowds left in the NFL.  We need this. 

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

As I have probably mentioned before, one of my (many) pet theories is that teams/players improve a lot more over the course of a season than most people realize.  Yes, teams improve by the addition (and, in many cases, subtraction) of players in the offseason, and certainly things like the timing and teamwork of The Spine, and QB/WR familiarity, are achieved in OTAs, minicamps, and even training camp itself.

However, without the benchmark of the games to guage the success of these measures, it’s hard to know where your efforts are going.   The ability to correct and amend what you practice based on your game experience, and even better the positive reinforcement from having all that non-game work put to proper use, can only be achieved during the season.

It strikes me now that we may well right now be having the privilege of watching not just one, but two men make The Leap in sports from “very good” to “great.”

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

I thought about doing an entire blog using only Sonny and Cher references, but that just wouldn’t be right.

Actually, this post-Patriots slaughter post should have been prefixed “The Goat Squeaks,” because after yelling for three hours fueled by two bourbons and about six beers (I try not to count), I decided that my final contribution to the win would be screaming at Belichick across the field from Section 254 of the Dome “to put Brady back in so that he could take his beating like a man,” and I think that kicked me over the edge to ******* up my larynx to a fine fare-thee-well.  The only sounds I made on Tuesday were every third syllable coming out as a high-pitched whistling noise, and now on Thursday night, I am so hoarse I still sound like Funkhouser.

And it was worth it.

Monday night was why we watch sports, why one guy I know came all the way in from Atlanta, missing two days of work,  just hoping to scalp a ticket.  Because unlike the static arts, where you can interpret at your leisure, or the dynamic arts, which (save some some improvisational formats like jazz) come off a score or a script, with sports, you just don’t know how it’s all going to play out, how it’s going to end.  So when you have the chance to maybe see something at least rare, if not unique, you’d best try to see it.  And some of us just have to see it in person.

I’m not sure if this was the biggest regular season game in Saints history;  I’d need to at least think about the season-ender in 1983 (feh, still not quite over that one) or the 1987 wins at either San Francisco (“Genius? Huh.”) or Pittsburgh (“It’s like throwing peanuts [popcorn? someone help me here] at a battleship.”) and chew on it for a while.  But it’s assuredly high on the list, and for the first time in team history it did send a clear signal:  this Saints team has no excuse not to win the Super Bowl.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Not that ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons needs me or anybody else pimpin’ for him, and I certainly wouldn’t do it otherwise, but if you listen to his podcast lamenting our beatdown of the Pats, you will find that Simmons and his buddy Cousin Sal credited the win to…..the crowd.  Stone cold truth.  You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, it comes up in the first five minutes.  To some extent, I agree with them.   We represent arguably the last true home-field advantage in the NFL.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnradio/player?id=4704715

Lot of Saints love, although I suspect that Simmons still has enough 18-1 bitterness that he is trying to talk himself into the Vikings beating us if we meet.  This topic will likely become relevant in later weeks, so I’ll wait until then to guide you through that particular fantasy land.

Final crowd thought:  the plaza sideline crowd now just pretty much stands up the entire game, like a college student section, or the general admission areas in English soccer stadiums where people used to get crushed to death.  This kind of fanaticism simply doesn’t happen in our well-cushioned, climate-controlled, post-modern pro sports America.  I’m trying to think of something more badass in sports right now, and I can’t.

-o-o-o-o-o-

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