In last week’s column, I said that the Saints had already won every type of game this season.
Looking back, I left one particular type of win out—exactly the kind of win New Orleans got this week in Atlanta.
A quick recap of the Saints casa Sunday: I had Snapps and Zaaps (don’t ask) over to enjoy an afternoon of NFL.
Snapps is a big Saints fan (Side note: I need to do a new Saints Guy Entourage Dissertation in the coming weeks) while Zaaps can take football or leave it.
No matter… New Orleans possibly going 13-0 calls for the more the merrier!
Naturally, at 23-9 the crowd in the house became a little more “comfortable.”
No Matt Ryan, no Michael Turner, and the Saints have a 14-point first half lead.
Ball game, right?
After halftime, however, it started to happen.
You could tell what was coming… in a not-so literal sense, you could
smell what was coming.
The Atlanta Falcons lingered—
stale fart lingered.
Side note so important I’m not including parentheses: Resorting to crudeness is hardly the M.O. of the Saints Guys; he’s a classy dude, so it takes a lot for him to write about flatulence.
But you could feel it in the air Sunday… the Saints took the foot off the pedal, overthought/overcoached, and kept the Falcons around.
Of course, Atlanta made a ball game of it.
It took two monster plays by Jonathan Vilma to secure the victory and keep the dream alive.
And it gave the Saints another kind of win on the year: the stale fart win.
See, the stale fart win is extremely rare.
Mainly because when a professional team lingers around long enough they can pull it out in the end.
The Falcons got close… TOO close for comfort.
Despite scoring 23 in the first half, the highly potent Saints offense could only muster three second half points – their second lowest point total of the 2009 season.
Bear in mind, this was against an injury ravaged Falcons team.
(Side note: Chris Redman was
selling insurance a few years ago.
While this isn’t quite on the level of Kurt Warner once bagging groceries, it’s still pretty good, right?
I joked on Twitter that since Redman was 32 years old, he should be selling Liberty Mutual…. Okay, it was funnier on Twitter.)
This, of course, leads to a
lingering (sorry, had to) question: Are the Saints only capable of playing on the level of their opponent of the week?
Let’s recap the past few weeks:
Nov. 8 Carolina, W, 30-20
Nov. 15 at St. Louis, W, 28-23
Nov. 22 at Tampa Bay, 38-7
Nov. 30 New England, 38-17
Dec. 6 at Washington, W, 33-30 OT
Dec. 13 at Atlanta, W, 26-23
When you look at that list (besides the Tampa Bay game) you can become concerned that we’re not blowing through the
bad teams.
And what
really may not make sense is looking at how hard we’ve come to play in the games that “mattered.”
News flash for the team going for 19-0:
every game matters.
It’s what we keep hearing from the coaching staff and the players, but it’s hard to believe given the current level of execution.
But, I’d like to take
my foot off the Saints’ necks and add this twist: isn't something bigger happening here?
Snapps may have summed it up best right after Vilma’s interception: “Sometimes, it’s just destiny.”
Why is that important?
Because he said that
before the Saints blew the fake field goal and
before Vilma’s 4th and 2 stand to seal the deal. When Vilma made that pick, we still knew we were going to win despite almost coughing the game up.
A couple of summers ago, everyone knew that the Saints were getting a talented playmaker, and he hasn’t disappointed yet.
He certainly saved the perfect season with his reads of the plays the Falcons were running.
See, it’s free agent signings and trades like Vilma, Darren Sharper, Mike Bell, and Drew Brees that have led us to this point.
It took some time, but we’re here now.
All four of those guys have been big in different games this year.
Now, take a moment and imagine
one of those guys not signing.
Try not to shudder.
Taking all that in, maybe I shouldn’t look at just one game and remember the whole is greater than the sums of its parts.
Maybe the stale fart game wasn’t all that bad.
Maybe we should remember that wins are still, in fact, wins.
Maybe…
It’s just destiny.
(Later this week, we’ll have the inaugural Saints Guy Mail Time thanks to one clever reader who really took the reins with this thing.)
