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.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Years ago, I was part of a large group of tweens playing jailbreak early on a Saturday night in somebody’s big back yard in Lakeview that backed up onto the 17th Street canal.  I was hiding in a tree growing out of the levee, about 10 feet up in the lower branches, and decided to make my move.  Unfortunately, the “move” involved my hand slipping on a dismount and me just falling backwards out of the tree, which was clearly a sub-optimal approach, and I remember being scared to death in that split second.

I had fallen out of/off of things before, but what I hadn’t yet experienced (possibly because New Orleans is flatter than Keira Knightley) is that when you fall and land on a surface that’s a downslope with a 35- or 40-degree angle, like the side of a levee, it hurts a hell of a lot less than when your line of failure is perpendicular to the line of pain.  So I hit the levee slope and slid down to the bottom…..and got right up, to my utter surprise, because nothing really hurt.  I had taken a pretty good thump and had the wind knocked out of me a little, but with a nervous can’t-believe-I-got-away-with-that laugh I was right back in the game.  The rest of the gang was as surprised as I was, but it sure beat the hell out of a trip to the hospital and everyone being sent home to sit with their families for the rest of the night.

 Where does that leave us with the 2011 Saints and blowing a playoff game in such a painful fashion?  Why am I not hurting like hell, like I should be, and why do I feel tired but relieved and confident?  Basically, we landed on a slope and deflected, and not flat on the deck with a missed-our-one-chance dead-cat bounce, as shown by three critical indicators.

-o-o-o-o-o-

First, we know how to recognize a great team.  When we were younger in our ignorance and delusion we thought the Mora and Haslett era Saints were potentially great teams.  Since we had never seen one up close, we really had no frame of reference, and the greatness of a great NFL team remained a mystery.

But now we’ve been to the mountaintop, seen the promised land, and walked right into it and taken a shiny trophy back home, and most of us truly believe (as do some objective observers such as national NFL media guys) that this team was even better than the one that won it all in 2009.  We did it before, we proved we can be in the top two or three teams fighting to do it again, and showed that this is a strong franchise that should expect to make continued playoff appearances and to contend for a Lombardi every year, like the Patriots, Steelers and Colts of the last 10 years.  We are there.

Second, we saw with our own eyes how close we remain to pre-eminence, even now.  We took the 49ers’ best shot, picked ourselves up off the deck and almost beat them at their house at their own game.   We didn’t deserve to win because of a key systems failure at a point of known weakness (the defensive coordinator’s stubbornness), but when you can take on that kind of challenge and perform so well as a whole under difficult conditions, you know that in addition to all the skill, this team really is tough enough to handle anything, and there’s nothing about a narrow loss of this type that disproves that proposition.  This franchise is still moving forward, not backward.

Third, we have the relentless leadership with the decisive sangfroid necessary to win it all again.  I have to give even further witness to Sean Payton’s greatness here.  Much is made of how the franchise (and really this is Payton) prides itself on being objective in player evaluation, in that once you got here, it’s irrelevant whether you were a first-round pick or a street free agent, the guys who produce get rewarded and those who aren’t good enough eventually cycle out.  He’s not an asshole about it by any means (the handling of the departures of so many hard-working fan favorites — Willie Whitehead, Beerman, Deuce, Predator, Fast Freddie McAfee, Darren Sharper — speak volumes to the man’s legitimate empathy and sense of a healthy organization), but neither ego nor sentiment get in the way of the ultimate goal and what’s best for the whole.

For Payton, it even applies to coaches.  For years at GSEZ, we have long believed that the #1 killer of the above-average class of NFL head coaches is not smoking, coronary disease, cancer, or the heartbreak of psoriasis as much as it is misguided loyalty to one or more key assistant coaches who can’t get it done.

Not Payton.  Such as it was with predecessor DC Gary Gibbs, a better friend of Payton’s, it is with now former DC Gregg Williams, a/k/a The Witchh Doctor, a/k/a The Family Practitioner, a/k/a The Quackk, n/k/a Gone in 60 Seconds (great line from some guy on saintsreport.com about Williams not talking to his defensive players before he left:  “He wanted to tell them, and he sent like eight guys in there to tell them, but none of them got there.”).  You know in your heart that even before the playoffs started, Payton knew that what we were doing, and in particular what Williams was doing, on defense wasn’t good enough.  The rift was there, Payton was right, Williams was wrong, and he’s already gone.

Moreover, we struck decisively to replace him with what is, as far anyone can tell, the best replacement on the market in new DC Steve Spagnuolo.  In a way, it’s a nice add-in of proof that, far from the days when you’d have to beg people to come here, this franchise is now a preferred destination.  The heck with the national sports media:  the free market has spoken, this franchise is where you want to be if you want to be successful.  We may never win another Super Bowl, but no one person or thing is ever going to get in our way.

-o-o-o-o-o-

And that’s why this one loss didn’t hurt so much, and it even taught me something about that obsession with the second Lombardi.

We here at GSEZ are obsessed with the second Lombardi because we wanted to remove all doubts about the franchise:  that 2009 wasn’t a fluke, this isn’t a cute story, this is not God’s consolation for Katrina, or any of that other bullshit.  We wanted it clear to ourselves and the rest of the world that we had arrived, that we belonged, that we had finally taken our place with the other NFL franchises that have had greatness.

But in the days after the loss, given how this team diagnosed and addressed the problems from 2010, logically and methodically built itself into greatness in 2011, and is already moving on to win it all in 2012, we had a moment of clarity.  All we ever really wanted out of the Saints was a professional effort year in and year out, to contend, to be one of the guys.

And we have that now.  The Super Bowl win in 2009 was mission-critical, yes.  But now that we understand greatness, we see it with our own eyes in our own backyard, and without the necessity of outside approbation.  We’re pretty confident that right now the Saints are the best team in the NFL on a neutral field, even if we failed to prove it.  We know how good these guys are, how good this franchise is, to be proud of, to be enjoyed, to yell about on Sundays until we are hoarse.  We’re not fearin’ any team.  And it’s all we ever really wanted.  Maybe there’s a little too much George Bailey or Dorothy Gale going on here, but I just feel like #wegotthis [tm -- Grandmaster Wang], we have arrived, and we ain’t going anywhere any time soon.

-o-o-o-o-o-

To close out on the 17th Street canal, Gregg Williams = US Army Corps of Engineers.

Just sayin’.

-o-o-o-o-o-

It was a tough loss, but the day’s over, it’s the cool of the evening now.  Even though we didn’t get what we wanted, we got plenty, and for right now, it’s enough.  We admittedly won’t be watching much football over the next couple of weeks, and part of me wishes I was on a plane to New Orleans right now like I should be, but I can deal with it all knowing what we got to see in 2011, what we have now, and what’s going to be.

GO SAINTS GO!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 11:18 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.