Girod Street End Zone

Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

If you’ll all indulge me this once, with a nod from The Goat I am going to depart a little bit from my traditional role as GSEZ’s human football abacus and do a little more free associating.  Fan does not live by data alone.

In trying to sort through all the seething fires in my brain in the days’ aftermath from last Saturday’s loss, I kept wondering where all the anger and depression were after the shock and denial.  It’s not like I was going to send out a search party….but I couldn’t figure out why the traditional rage, the type that former DC Rick Venturi used to inspire with more reliability than a Swiss railway system, hadn’t shown up.

Yesterday, I finally settled on where I was about the 2011 Saints, and how it all finished, and where I am now:  it’s where I was the night I fell out of that tree on the eastern levee of the 17th Street canal.  And I think it’s where you should be, too.

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Gregg Williams, 2009-2011.

Ggood bye and ggood ******* riddance.   As Patronius said, the Witchh Doctorr might turn out to have been a Quackk all along.  And we can’t say we weren’t warned, either.

http://www.girodstreetendzone.com/2011/11/27/the-report-rating-your-physician-edition/

The chickens, as Malcolm X prophesied, have come home to roost.  And the best Saints team in franchise history, on the cusp of hosting the NFC championship game and heading to an indoor Super Bowl, is going to be watching from the sidelines with the rest of us, because Gregg ******* Williams just had to prove once more that pragmatism >>> ideology every time.

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The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Yeah, I’ll admit it.  There was one night in my life I didn’t hate the 49ers.  On January 29, 1995, the 49ers won Super Bowl XXIX 49-26 over the San Diego Chargers, and Rickey Jackson got his well-deserved Super Bowl ring.

Other than that, fuck ‘em.   The Falcons hate runs strong because we have to deal with them twice a year.  For better or worse, the 49ers, who have been pretty much irrelevant since 1998, essentially ran and hid with realignment in 2002, but we have now hunted them down.  I am looking forward to Saturday night’s game like a Russian plutocrat heading to Vegas for a four-day weekend with a suitcase full to bursting with quality blow and stacks of non-consecutive Benjamins.

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 I’m sure you’re at least a little like me.  You’re so tired of hearing about the Frisco defense, you want to poke out your own eardrums, or at least stop clicking on ESPN.com more than once every 11 minutes to see if anything has happened (which it has not) or there’s any new information (which there is not).

It’s just astonishing to me that everyone is ignoring the great subplot of this game:  the Saints defense against the 49ers offense.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

Now that we have dispatched the not-ready-for-prime Detroit Lions (although not without a tip of the cap to Lions QB Matthew Stafford and to Megatron), we turn to the next order of business, a multi-purpose business trip to San Francisco, or, as we shall refer to it, Frisco, because they hate that.   Among this weekend’s to-do’s:

• survive and advance to the NFCCG;
• win our first road playoff game ever;
• exact a bit of revenge for the suffering of our ancestors in the 80s and early 90s, when we are certain that there’s no way the 49ers ever rounded the corner on any salary cap or free agency issues, because former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo is just not that kind of guy; and
• most importantly, shutting a lot of people the fuck up about how good the 49ers are, and how tough a matchup this is for the 2011 New Orleans Saints, because we are playing outside for fuck’s sake.

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

And so the second season begins.  The world of maybe one-and-done, which we thought we left behind in the John Hughes era, only to rediscover in Seattle while the 2010 team was still looking for itself in a post-Lombardi fog 11 months later.  January madness.  Win or go home.  Survive and advance.  Nurse, hand me another cliche, stat.

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So where does that leave us in the opening round of the playoffs, other than seething with revenge for having the Bye, which was our Birthright, stolen from us?

We have solved Bruce Cockburn’s problem:  the lions will be right here.

I spent part of this evening struggling with buyer’s remorse, having hoped for the Packers to beat the Lions last Sunday to avoid a third game with the Falcons for the opening round of the playoffs.  Dumb, dumb, dumb of me.   Dumb.  I let my fear of the possibility, however remote, of having to deal with losing to the Falcons in the playoffs again blind me to a whole bunch of points that would have been more obvious if I hadn’t been drinking double Maker’s Mark old fashioneds all that afternoon:

1.  We own the Falcons.  We talked about this last week.  I swear that somebody told me that Falcons HC Mike Smith has a tramp stamp across his lower back that says “Sean Payton” in old English letters.   (Not sure I want to know how he knows, honestly.)  There’s not a single thing they do well enough that conflicts with anything we don’t do that well.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Corresopndent

There’s the old saw that adversity doesn’t build character, but it does reveal it.  Such is the way of the final week of the NFL season, where all the bad marriages blow up (Jets, Oakland), the wannabes get exposed a little (Lions, 49ers), and the pros tell everyone to step aside so you can see how it’s done (Packers, Saints, Patriots). 

But before we try to start picking apart playoff scenarios based on who’s hot and not, whether/how badly we beat the Lions, should we get ahead of ourselves about Frisco (because they hate being called that, sort of their version of “New Orleenz”), we wanted to take a few quick deep data dives to get a sense of the Saints.  Most of us Saints fans are doing a pretty good job of ignoring the shiny object of various individual and team records because we want the permanent legitimacy and complete redemption that only comes with a second Lombardi.  Nobody wants to be the one-and-done dynasty that wasn’t, like the 80s Bears or the Colts of the ‘aughts; the teams you remember are the multiple winners, the 49ers, the Steelers, the Cowboys, the Patriots.  THOSE are the teams that set the standard and send coaches and players to the Hall of Fame.

Meanwhile, we Saints fans have no frame of reference to gauge this current Greatness thing that’s been thrust upon us.  Last year, we looked (and we believe with great insight) into where the 2009 team fit with the Super Bowl winners of the last 10 years.  Thus, we decided to do a little digging as to how good this team is, not in any sense of premature celebration, but more for a foundation of how much swagga and steel the fan base should have starting Saturday night and hopefully all the way to a post-game victory party at St. Elmo’s.

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