Girod Street End Zone

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

We can’t possibly lose this game.  We can beat them to death with movies.   There has only been one movie ever worth watching made with any reference to Minnesota whatsoever.  New Orleans, on the other hand……

1.  The Big Easy versus The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid
One, an iconic if ham-fisted 2-1/2 star detective potboiler, spoiled only for the locals by a Dennis Quaid “Cajun accent” so bad they should have just gone for realism and cast Jackie Chan instead.  The other, an obscure revisionist Western from the ’70s that is not so much obscure as that no one, even star Cliff Robertson, ever cared.

2.  A Streetcar Named Desire versus Feeling Minnesota
One, an iconic movie production of the apex of Tennessee Williams’ work, launching star Marlon Brando into the stratosphere forever, the other an obscure revisionist released-con film that is not so much obscure as that no one, even star Keanu Reeves (cameo by Dan Aykroyd as a lawman), ever cared.

3.  The Waterboy versus Fargo
One, an iconic Cajun-out-of-water bildungsroman that launched Adam Sandler, well, somewhere, as he finally found an ethnic group he could safely mock in America, the other the only good movie ever made involving Minnesota, and it still has the line “Go Bears” in it.  I mean, Bobby Boucher against Jerry f******* Lundegaard?  Are you kidding me?  I got yer Minnesota Nice right here, squarehead.  You are going down.

I would go on, but I am out of Minnesota movies.   On the other hand, I have a Drew Brees-like panoply of weapons, forcing me to leave on the bench such additional worthy Crescent City cinema fare as JFK, Cat People, The Buccaneer, King Creole, Murder at the Mardi Gras (cameo by Wayne Mack as a lawman), and the TV version of Perry Como’s Spring in New Orleans.

Take that and maybe go back after the game and buy some cool at the Mall of America with your Capital One card, Ragnar.

-o-o-o-o-o-

 ….and speaking of which, there is another reason that God will not let us lose this game.  The other team plays its home games in something called “Mall of America Stadium.”  Really?  A stadium named after a mall?  Are you kidding me?  Do people get confused and go there to shop?  Did they even consider renaming the mall “Metrodome Building of Stores Full of Things You Really Don’t Need”?  

Christ, and I thought I hated the Falcons.  Maybe it was all Jerry Lundegaard’s idea.

Now, what do we play in?  A Superdome.  A freaking Superdome.  Nietzsche would be proud, goddammit.

-o-o-o-o-o-

“The most important thing to remember is: to protect your quarterback…”
Paul Crewe, The Longest Yard

I will say this much for Sean Payton:  he self-scouts, and I don’t mean his team but himself, about as well and as fast as any sports figure I’ve ever seen, and I guarantee that he has learned his lessons from the 2006 NFCCG, and various games along they way where he’s traded quarterback protection and ball security for justonemore tempting shot down the field.  (Even if he were not self-scouting so well, I suspect a simple appreciation of popular cinema such as the above would be a sufficient reminder.)

As you can imagine, Claude and I have been sifting the proper data, and Claude should have more on that later in the week.  For now, accept my broader assertion that Minnesota’s only real shot to steal this game is to not just neutralize Drew Brees but to force him into mistakes.   The Vikings’ overall defense is regularly overrated by the pundits for some reason or another (such as, the pundits are lazier than we are, and not as smart), but the Minnesota front four is legit.

I still submit that The Spine is the best OL in football.  Nevertheless, sometimes you do get beat, and I suspect that given the pressure the Vikings can bring, Payton will remember the lessons of games lost in 2006-2008 and protect Brees, most likely by sticking with the run like it’s 2009, particularly running right at Jared Allen, and mixing up his protections to regularly chip the DEs.

It’s tempting to want to go and carve up the Vikings’ secondary (seven INTs by the DBs all year, 26 TD passes allowed (23rd in the NFL), 92.5 opponent passer rating allowed (27th in the NFL), all this despite playing behind the best pass rush line the league) like a cooked chicken, but when the one real risk of losing the game is a -2 turnover differential, ball security, meaning quarterback security, comes first.   I am confident that Payton, who’s been further in the playoffs and learned more and better lessons than Brad Childress, will again make the right calls.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Look, the Vikings have a good team.  On the other hand, since the first week of the season, the Saints have been a better one. 

Do not be confused by national media figures who still cannot get out of their heads their images of the two teams that they burned into their own brains in August, and are now talking themselves into the Vikings being “better” because they say so, because none of what we’ve seen, or the numbers we’ve looked at, have headed in that direction since before Labor Day. 

Everybody thinks they’re an above-average driver, and everybody thinks their qualitative judgment is above-average too.  People luuuuuv their own instincts, which at GSEZ we just take as a code word for laziness:  we don’t get comfy until we’ve tried to square our judgment with the data.  Not to cop out, but this post has gone on too long and I’ll leave some of the data mining for Claude to go through later in the week.

Let me close with that the only way we lose this game is if it’s just one of those days.  But it’s not going to be.  And unless the movie on the plane is Black Sunday, I’ll see you in Miami.

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 12:29 am and is filed under 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.