Girod Street End Zone

Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

It’s already started.  They just can’t help themselves. 

Every (well, not “every,” I just can’t resist the melodrama) print  and broadcast sports pundit alive is falling all over themselves to predict the Saints not to repeat as Super Bowl champions.

(What does “print media” mean anymore?  We need a new word for “people who want you to write what they type instead of listen to what they say.”  I might go with “read media”, although “finger media” probably says it best.)

It’s not a “no respect” thing, it’s a “desperate to distinguish myself while not taking too many chances about being wrong” thing.  Of course, since The Goat called the Saints as the no. 1 NFC seed right before the season opener last year, we know what not being wrong feels like.   It’s not that we were desperate to distinguish ourselves, but we do want to be right.

Most of these guys won’t do either.  To roughly quote www.despair.com, people are conformists who, when free to do as they please, usually imitate one another.  Want to stand out from the crowd?  Stop frantically flopping about like a fish on a dock, hoping to guess what team other than the Saints might be this year’s NFL version of Snooki and The Situation.  Instead, just keep a clear head and see the obvious:  the Saints have a better chance than any team in the NFL to be in the Super Bowl this year and to win it again.

These guys will tell you that every season is different, and then turn around and cite how few teams have made repeat trips to the Super Bowl recently.

These Saints are different from those old flavors of the month.  The critics?  Ignore them all.

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Man of the Match:  Today’s MOTM is MLB Jonathan Vilma.  An expensive pickup, costing two draft choices as well as a new market-rate deal akin to a FA contract, Vilma wasn’t exactly dropped on our doorstep like Marques Colston.  And, despite the high tackle total from his rookie year, Vilma is no thumper, and not likely to stand up a big back in the hole like a Sam Mills or a Vaughn Johnson would have.

On the other hand, he is Mills’s spiritual heir as the intellectual leader of the defense.  Because the Saints defense is sometimes physically undermanned, every proper positioning of his teammates counts:  if you can’t run that fast, better if you have an extra step before the snap, and if you’re not that strong, better you be in a position of superior leverage.  When you can start to get in the QB’s rhythm and mess with his head, so much the better:  Tracy Porter’s season-saving pick of Favre in the NFCCG started the moment Vilma switched the D out of man-to-man and into zone coverage right before the snap.  Vilma was a huge, huge differentiator for this team from a defensive QB standpoint, and I submit that without him there is no Lombardi, maybe for that play alone.

Morevoer, the world keeps changing.  In an ever-more throwing league, is it critical to have Dick Butkus or Ray Nitschke to blow up running plays?  Maybe just having a guy who is probably the league’s best MLB in pass coverage is not such a bad thing.  If I can’t have Ray Lewis, give me a guy who can turn and run with a TE (or even a possession WR like Austin Collie) for 30 yards as one more interchangeable part in my back seven.  Vilma remains a critical element to this defense, and although his run game tackle stats are a little hampered by the DL in front of him, as the Saints’ defensive playcaller he was no. 2 as far as team MVP goes, and it’s hard to put a price on brains like that.

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Dynasties and Wannabes:  We’ve been trying to get a sense of the chances of the Saints having a great five-year run, as opposed to being one-and-done, or ending up like the 49ers or the Redskins from the 80s instead of the Rams from the 2000s.   We started by looking to see if there were any reasonably common denominators, over a variety of characteristics.  We came up with four we liked:

– Franchise stability: ownership (and its stability), GM situation, chain of command, owner/GM/coach relationship?
– Head coach:  Transcendant?  Caretaker?  In over his head? Knucklehead?
– Quarterback:  System guy?  Hall of Famer?
– Offensive line:  Great players?  Consistent lineup or revolving door?

We looked back at eight franchises since 1962 that were consistent playoff powerhouses and multiple Super Bowl winners, and we’ll pick through some of those notes in the next few weeks before the season, and contrast those teams with some “where are they now” guys who teased more than they achieved.

Pittsburgh Steelers, 1974-1979
Four Super Bowl wins in six years, what can you say? 

Franchise Stability:  The Rooney family.  And the Steelers are now on their fourth head coach (who just got a contract extension) since the Saints played their first game.  The gold standard.
Coach:  Chuck Noll.  More caretaker than transcendant genius,  but an educated and thoughtful man and a model of consistency: 193 wins and a 13-year stretch without a losing season.
Quarterback:  Terry Bradshaw.  Strong arm, headstrong, big, big playmaker.  Hall of Fame.
Offensive line:  Over a six-year stretch, only eight different starters, very, very little turnover in the group.

All those Lombardis don’t leave much to pick over.  They had it allContrast with……

Chicago Bears, 1984-1991
One of my old friends, a Chicago native, always ruefully called this “the dynasty that wasn’t.”  Only one SB win, in 1985, despite an NFL best 62 wins from 1984-1988 and 11-win seasons in 1990-1991.

Franchise Stability:  Losing George Halas and Jim Finks in 1983 didn’t seem to kill the momentum, hard to see a real negative here.
Coach:  Mike Ditka is a bright enough guy who certainly believes himself a great motivator, and to a large degree he may be right….but there’s a reason these guys could never get back to the Super Bowl once Buddy Ryan left the D-coordinator position after their Super Bowl win.  Even with superior physical force, Ditka was never a match for the league’s elite coaches (Walsh, Parcells, Gibbs) in January.   Too much bluster, not enough insight.
Quarterback:  Jim McMahon.  Overhyped journeyman.  For example, his backup Mike Tomczak, an underhyped journeyman, was 7-0 as a starter on the 1986 team that went 14-2.  Jim Harbaugh QB’d the 1990-91 teams, with great defenses and only one playoff win (of course, against the 8-8 Saints, with an even worse QB situation…)  No Bears QB was ever a critical success factor here, and it shows in the playoff results.
Offensive line:  The real crime, here, they had solid guys with almost no turnover.  Other than a couple of injury exceptions and a swapout to insert star youngster Jimbo Covert at LT in the late 80s, the same five guys started for most of the eight years.

With one of the all-time great defenses and such OL consistency, you’ve got to hang these Bears on the limitations of Ditka, which were so boldly illuminated in the stark relief provided by his tour of duty with the Saints, and their mediocrity at the QB position.

I’ll cover more of these in an attempt to spice up the lack of pre-season excitement, and of course near the start of the season, we’ll see where the 2010 Saints might fit in with all these teams.

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Media guys are already mentioning that Malcolm Jenkins has more than a shot to start at FS this year.  Thinking back to last year, Jenkins was a force on plays in front of him:  gunner on the punt coverage team, tracking Wes Welker underneath in the Patriots game and essentially beating him up and taking him out of the game. 

Even when he wasn’t always super-effective at CB, the plays he would make came when he could use his instincts and go downhill, such as the almost-INT a few plays before Porter’s pick-six to clinch the Super Bowl.  On the other hand, he was never billed as having elite speed, and he isn’t the smoothest turn-and-run guy I’ve ever seen, so maybe he’s a cover-2 CB but isn’t all that well suited for a system like the Witchh Doctor’s that demands a lot of solo man coverage.

The bottom line is that he’s probably never more than a decent NFL cornerback, but instead is a fast, strong, athletic free safety with decent ball skills and undeniable football instincts.  I’ll be surprised if he’s not our starting FS this year, and shocked if he’s not damn good at it.  Honestly, he’d better:  he was the 14th pick in the draft last year, and if I am taking a safety in the top half of the first round, he’d better be an impact player.

At any rate, Darren Sharper or not, the Saints secondary, already among the elite, will have the strongest nickel and dime packages in the league this year.  This is even harder to get my head around than winning a Super Bowl.  It wasn’t that long ago that I was hanging all my hopes on just one more good game out of little engines that could like my guy Fast Freddy Thomas….and look at us now.

GO SAINTS GO!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 12:50 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.