Girod Street End Zone

Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

In the immortal word of MC Hammer:  Proper. 

There is nothing better than a beatdown of the Atlanta Falcons on national television, and then I got to wondering why this felt so particularly….good.

What I finally came to is that it’s the reverse of the feeling we’d had as Saints fans since 1967, and now we have to adjust to living in a new world.  For a real fine expression of just how new that world is, I can’t recommend this

www.moosedenied.com/we-make-the-rules-pal/

enough. Warning, there are some dirty words (gasp!), but in this case they are somewhere between “completely justified” and “sine qua non”.

-o-o-o-o-o-

What you’re feeling in general, of course, is greatness.  It’s here, it’s real, and it’s spectacular.  What makes it even better is that the one team you hate so much, is good enough to compete….but not good enough.  Even better, they think they are this close.  And if this doesn’t feel for them like how it felt for us to be chasing the 49ers in the late 80s, I don’t know what does.  And now let’s look at it, Claude style:

Saints vs. 49ers, 1986-1992 (Saints score first, @ = at SF):

1986
17-26 @ — L
23-10 — W
1987
22-24 –L
26-24 @ –W
1988
33-34 — L
17-30 @ — L
1989
20-24 — L
13-31 @ — L
1990
12-13 — L
13-10 @ — W
1991
10-3 — W
24-38 @ — L
1992
10-16 — L
20-21 @ — L

Maddening.  As we’ve said before, we were Cheers, and the 49ers were Garry’s Olde Towne Tavern.  Four-and-10 over seven years, and just 2-6 in games decided by less than a touchdown.  The whole time I thought were were ohsoclose, just right there, and the whole time the 49ers were just better, their B-plus game or even their B-game always a little better than our A-game.

And now a brief review of the Falcons-Saints results in the Payton era, this time from Atlanta’s point of view:

Falcons versus Saints, 2006-2011, (Falcons score first, @ = at N.O.):

2006
3-23 @ — L
13-31 — L
2007
16-22 — L
14-34 — L
2008
34-20 — W
25-29 @ — L
2009
27-35 @ –L
23-26 — L
2010
27-24 @ — W
14-17 — L
2011
23-26 — L
16-45 @ — L

Look familiar?

That’s 10-2 Saints over the last 12 games, and the Saints are 5-1 against the Falcons in games decided by less than a touchdown.  There’s a reason for it, in parallel to the old Saints-49ers:  when you have a huge edge in coaching (both in planning and in game-day moves) and a huge gap at quarterback, and you expect to win more of the games, and more of the close games.  That’s just how it is.

Mike Smith, Atlanta’s head coach, is obviously a fine football man.  His teams are disciplined, they hit, they play hard for 60 minutes.  When absolutely everything fell into place last year in the regular season (turnovers, another year of being among the league leaders in penalties called against their opponents over 16 games, ridiculous good health), they could even get to 13-3.

All of which is just too, too evocative of Jim Mora Sr.  But while Smith is a fine checker player, at the highest levels of NFL play, including the playoffs, the game is chess.  And Sean Payton and Drew Brees play chess.

I wish I could have gotten this baby out late last week (apologies, travel schedules blew up GSEZ’s posting schedule this week and last), so we could have dropped a massive BOLD PREDICTION on you about a comfortable Saints victory, but when you look back at those patterns, it’s obvious enough.  Forget the business about division rivals knowing each other, and the games always being close, blah, blah, blah.  There’s a huge difference between being a contendah and a champion.  We’re just a lot better than every other random decent NFL team, and the Falcons are no exception, and they just have to deal with it.

-o-o-o-o-o-

I guess I have to give my whole two cents on Drew’s current situation, as addressed to some extent by Grandmaster Wang in his moosedenied.com post linked above.  My take is that his greatness is qualified by so many people out of envy and self-loathing.

Most of the other great quarterback heroes of this or any other generation tend to be, well, taller and/or swaggerier (now there’s some good writing there, non?) figures, starting with Unitas and working forward through Namath, Fouts, Marino, Aikman, Manning, Brady, and the like, even Rothlisberger for crissakes.  Big guys who apparently have strong arms, and some with mobility to boot.  The outlier, Joe Montana, won a title in his third season, and seemed to have been born/blessed with magical and transcendent qualities not ordinarily doled out to mortals.

On the other hand, Brees is, well, he’s the same apparent height and build as a lot of us.  If those other guys were great, well, they were born that way, and as long as they put in the requisite Hard Work, they were granted the fruits of their destiny.

But Brees is too much like the rest of us, so for him to be great, he must have a little help, or not be so great, or something, just like when that nondescript kid from your class you didn’t remember or like all that much became an internet millionaire:  why him and not us?  Must be all luck, or enough that it all fell into place, or his buddy got him in there, or something.  What kills Brees for these guys is his apparent regularity, that his gifts and talent are not so apparent.

In short, I can rationalize my own mediocrity when I look at Tom Brady, but I can’t when I look at Drew Brees, because there is no good answer for why him and not me (other than “I must have failed somewhere”), and then without even realizing it I have to start pulling him down by degrees.  It doesn’t make the critics/minimizers/qualifiers bad people, it just proves their humanity with all its limitations.

When you look at the sheer numbers, the wins, the Lombardi, what he did with this whole franchise, and the fact that the whole book’s not written yet, Brees is on a par with Manning and Brady as one of the three transcendent quarterbacks of his generation, to take his place with the Unitases and the Marinos of the other generations, and everybody is just going to have to come to terms with it one way or the other.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Meanwhile, a very happy new year to everyone, and let’s enjoy an injury free game against the Panthers tomorrow.  There’s no way in hell the 49ers are losing, so let’s come out unscathed and get ready to hat trick our favorite little bitches in two weeks.

GO SAINTS GO!

8-7-1 last week, 115-108-17 on the year.  Need a big finish to beat the bookie.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2011 at 3:37 pm 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.