The Goat Speaks: #doable
The Goat
GSEZ Founder
Saints head coach Sean Payton always talks about breaking the regular season into four four-game quarters, and he we are at 9-3. While we’re not quite yet smelling greatness, we’re getting at least a whiff of something good here, and they’re not done cooking, although the roux is already a perfectly roast nut brown.
At this point, I would say that at least a little bit of celebration is in order — with a regular season record of 33-11 from 2009 to the present, this is already the most successful three-year run in Saints history, topping the 32-win three-year run from 2008-2010 and the 31-win runs by the 1987-89 and 1990-92 and 1991-93 Jim Mora Sr. Saints. In addition, we are 9-3 for only the eighth time in franchise history, having hit that mark in each of the last three years. (Oddly, the Mora Saints hit that mark five times in six seasons from 1987-1992, and never finished with a first-round bye or a playoff win, one of the great frustrating sports mysteries of my lifetime. Or maybe not. ) Throw in the playoff appearances and a Lombardi, and what will be our second division title in three years, heady times indeed. Laissez les bon temps….whatever.
But let’s not stop there.
Look, to be sure, we are not at #wegotthis [tm -- Grandmaster Wang] like we wanted to be, but we are very definitely at #doable (no, it does not always mean what you think it means). I don’t care how 12-0 Green Bay is. We’re doing fine, and we here at GSEZ are pretty sure it’s going to get better before it gets worse, we can definitely do this second Lombardi party, and we’ve got three reasons.
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First, despite Claude’s largely accurate but perhaps bleakish, half-full assessment of Gregg Williams (n/k/a The Family Practitioner) last week, the defense is no longer getting steamrolled by the better offenses like it was earlier in the year. It’s still giving up yards, and points, but it’s noticeable that the defense as a whole is doing a better job, for longer periods of time during games, over the last six weeks:
Colts: nothing until we were up 31-0.
Rams: held the Rams at bay for the entire first half, until the inexplicable team-wide meltdown in the last two minutes that cost us the game, in the worst effort in Payton’s six year run.
Bucs: the Bucs had nine points with five minutes to go, and only got their TD on a gift call.
Falcons: at home, the Falcons only had 13 points with seven minutes to go; the offense’s inability to stick the knife in hurt, and that 10-point collapse was inexcusable, but you can’t just ignore the first 53 minutes.
Giants: up 35-10 after three quarters, enough said.
Lions: up 17-0, and then 24-7 at the half; I know they ran up and down the field on us in the second half, but Detroit is 8th in the NFL in yards per game and 4th in points per game, and they only finished with 17.
I’m not going to bother with yards allowed or points per game totals. At this point, we have a sense of the talent level (DL OK but no pass rushers at all, LBs are at this point just a collection of journeymen, and the DBs all pretty decent but without any one or two great playmakers), the coaching style (The Family Practitioner), and what they’re trying to accomplish (keep the game in front of us, stop the run, stop the big play, don’t worry about first downs between the 20′s, because the other team will stop themselves just often enough for us to get a two-score lead). If you go back and look at the yardage totals and points allowed in the back half of the 2009 season, or the defensive stats this year of some of the league’s better franchises like New England and Green Bay, it will keep things in perspective a little. This defense can’t carry a bad offense, but we don’t have a bad offense, so they don’t have to. They just have to keep it together. That’s life in the modern NFL.
I might feel just a little better if I got the sense that we were really starting to have the ability to close games out, like we didn’t do against Atlanta. We should be in more of a position to turn loose a four man pass rush and some tighter pass defense to close a game out, and as did not happen against the Falcons and to a lesser extent the Lions. In the playoffs, you are pretty much guaranteed to see talented and experienced QBs on the other side of the line, and that’s one area where we’ll need to find some more juice in the next four weeks.
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Second, the offense has pretty much stopped turning the ball over. Although we remain minus 2 in the giveaway/takeaway department, only three teams (GB, SF and Houston) have fewer turnovers than the Saints, and we’ve only had one little turnover in the four games since that Rams debacle, a brilliant pick of QB Drew Brees by Bucs CB Ronde Barber almost a month ago. The reasons are varied: the OL has solidified with the re-installation of Brian De La Puente as the starting center and the return of Zach Strief to RT and kept Brees very comfortable; ball discipline has been an emphasis since training camp; we’ve had better offensive balance, and leads, so Brees hasn’t had to press. Really, the key is the improved play and discipline of Brees; not only are there fewer INTs, there have only been a handful of Brees passes in the last month that were even risky, where he gets that “force it” disease and some ball pops up in the air in the opposing secondary and you just hold your breath. (Mind you, when that happens when we’re on defense, you don’t even get excited, because you KNOW that ball’s hitting the ground.) If we’re not turning the ball over, we’re not losing.
As a side note, relating back to our first point, the defense is starting to get more takeaways, in addition to its improved overall play. Three INTs in the last three games, it’s just a trickle, but the takeaways have to start somewhere, right?
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Third, and probably most important, this team has just about developed its identity, and the framework is in the two points above. The defense just needs to fight a holding action: get a stop here, give up a TD there, get a turnover here, force a FG there, don’t get burned repeatedly, keep the game in hand. Meanwhile, the offensive line is playing a physical, consistent brand of football that allows us a very solid running game while keeping a clean pocket for Brees, who in turn is playing the best ball of his career while smartly taking sacks instead of trying to make a play every play.
The thesis, very simply, boils down to this: even if we don’t get many takeaways, as long as we don’t give the ball away, we’ll win the battle of the ”who’s better at 80-yard drives” contest against anybody in the league over a 60-minute period.
This team is no longer searching for an identity, as in late 2008 (when we found the running game that ended up a key springboard to 2009 success), or all last year right through the fourth quarter of the playoff loss to Seattle (post-Super Bowl where-is-my-motivation-to-top-last-year haze). I can’t guarantee it, but I feel more like this team has a shot at a monster finish than a Haslett-era late-season collapse, or even a Mora-esque one and done playoff whimper.
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Where does this all leave us, 12 games into the 2011 season? One of our favorite metrics in separating the players from the wannabes is your record, and net points, in games against the other good teams. At the three-quarter pole of the 2011 NFL season, you can see the gaps in records against other playoff contenders, i.e. the kinds of teams you’ll play playoff games against, and net points in those games:
The playaz:
Green Bay, 6-0, plus 70
Baltimore, 6-1, plus 67
SAINTS, 5-1, plus 58
The couldbes:
New England, 4-2, plus 34
Pittsburgh, 4-3, plus 26
Chicago, 3-2, plus 10
San Francisco, 3-2, plus 5
Houston, 3-3, plus 21
The wannabes:
Oakland, 4-2, minus 3
Detroit, 3-5, minus 28
Atlanta, 2-4, minus 26
Denver, 3-4, minus 47
Dallas, 1-3, minus 8
NYGiants, 1-3, minus 31
Tennessee, 2-4, minus 54
NYJets, 1-4, minus 54
Cincinnati, 1-5, minus 42
You can play with the groupings if you want (Houston’s and Chicago’s QB situations, Steelers are hot and maybe should be in the top group based on QB and history, etc.), but I think they work pretty well. If anything, it should calm your soul about how good this team is now, and can be for the balance of the regular season and beyond. Finally, at least for me, it’s taken away my big concern that we weren’t going to get that precious first-round bye that I was putting so much weight on. This is one of the three best teams in the league, and there’s no team we can’t play with, our place or theirs.
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As far as this Sunday’s game against the Titans, this is an outdoor road game against a 7-5 team that is middlin’ in pretty much all respects, give up plenty of yards but not too many points (of course, they get to play Jacksonville and Indy twice….), move the ball a little but don’t light up the scoreboard. (Side note: the Saints are a four-point road favorite, which is the same spread for the 49ers on the road against a hapless Arizona. Hmmm.) Before I started thinking about it, I was worried about “road game”, “trap game”, “other team has a great running back”, “we’ll be flat,” and all that other ****, but now I think we’re past all that, and I expect us to continue the formula: keep the game in hand, package a couple of stops with a couple of lightning quick Touchdown Drives for a 14- or 21-point second quarter burst to totally change the arc of the game, and ride that lead home.
Also, much like the Ravens game near the end of 2010, I’m not really sure the result here matters, as much as the test tube for an outside game prior to the playoffs. Unless the 49ers somehow drop two games, we’re not getting the no. 2 seed, and their schedule is frightfully easy down the stretch. And as far as the NFC South, even if we lose to the Titans and Falcons, we win the division as long as we beat the Vikings and Panthers, and if we can’t do that you can throw everything else out the window, along with everything I think I know about the Saints. So I’m not fretting Sunday or the score too much, as long as nobody gets hurt.
Saints 34, Titans 24.
WHO DAT.
8-8 last week, 95-86-11 overall. Need a little run here to get away from the vig.