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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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”.

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Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games.

Yeah, cheapo lead-in, stolen millions of times by hacks like me since the late 1800s.  You get what you pay for around here.

If I told you the Saints would have a road game in which

• they rushed for 114 yards and held the ball for over 37 minutes
• they had no turnovers
• Drew Brees had a completion percentage over 75% and passed for 337 yards
• the defense had held the other team to three points for the first 42 minutes of the game
• the defense had a huge drive-killing stuff on a fourth-and-1 quarterback sneak
• we held Chris Johnson to 23 yards rushing

then you would have assumed a nice blowout victory.

If I told you the Saints would have a road game in which

• they had TD punt return called back
• they went 0-3 in the red zone, with one TD pass not called a TD on a thisclose call by the refs and another TD pass dropped in the end zone by Lance Moore
• they had 11 penalties, any number of which resulted in the recall of scores or nice gains
• the Saints would lose two challenges, but the Titans would win one on a thisclose call resulting in a lost fumble reversed
• on the last three Titans drives of the game, starting with 7:01 to go, the Saints allowed a total of 188 yards on just 20 plays

then you would have assumed it was a colossal choke-job loss.

You were closer the first time.

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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.

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Claude Coupee
GSEZ Correspondent

First, please accept our apologies for the temporary technical difficulties last week; as you can see, thanks to our friendly neighborhood hosting service, we are back on line.

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Please don’t think we’ve been asleep during the bye week.  A lot of what we’ve been doing is health care-related, trying to figure out the exact proper dosage of Jim Beam that’s going to be necessary the next time we have to ask our defense to protect a lead in a mission-critical road game.  Right now, my best guess is something like six ounces, or two doubles, for one seven-minute game stretch of football that will last about 20 minutes in real time.

The reason we’re checking the bourbon metrics is that it makes more sense than the following syllogism:

Major premise:  In critical sports situations, you want your best players on the field.

Minor premise:  The worst position group by far of the 2011 Saints, based on talent and results (if you believe any of the stats we’ve seen from various sources since Labor Day), is the linebackers.

Conclusion:  In protecting a hard-earned 10-point lead over Atlanta with seven minutes to go, I would make sure that LBs Scott Shanle, Jo-Lonn Dunbar and Jon Casillas were on the field together for every last ******* one of the defense’s final 23 plays.

Madonn’!…. *facepalm*

As enjoyable as beating the Falcons always is, for 2011 we’ve always wanted more.  We want(ed) this to be a great team, one clearly capable of a championship….and once again we failed to make the leap.  Up 17-13 in the third, we had numerous shots to go up by 11 points and force the Falcons in effect to need two TDs to beat us.  Instead, settling for field goals, we left the door open for them, a door our defense absolutely failed to shut, as the Falcons were down 23-13 at their own 19 with seven minutes left, and just a little while later we were damn lucky we didn’t lose in regulation.   Oddly, the one conclusion I reached watching those last two Falcons drives in regulation told me not so much about the 2011 Saints in particular as this:  Gregg Williams is nothing special as a defensive coordinator.

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