Smelling the Perfume

Ok ok, so I was quiet for a couple weeks as I let the events of the state's biggest football teams play out.  First I truly felt LSU had a good chance to beat Auburn.  Wrong!  Second, I felt that after their performance against Tampa Bay, the Saints had righted the ship and would cruise past 1-5 Cleveland and their 23rd ranked defense.  So confident was I that I skipped the game and watched it on tv .  After all ,why be inconvenienced by that dome crowd for what was certainly going to be a boring blow out. EeeYeaah no.
Needless to say I was dissapointed by the results of both games. 
Although I'll never be knocked over by a feather when Les Miles is outcoached, Sean Payton is beginning to resemble the mad hatter with each passing week.
As the 1-5 Browns stumped the Saints on Tommy Bowden's old Tulane coaching philosphy,"trickery,deceit and deception", my mind kept drifting to something former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown once said, " praise is like perfume, smells good but tastes bitter". 
Payton still smells the perfume. 
We all know the deserved praise that was heaped on Payton after the Super Bowl.  The man absolutely earned it.  But praise in its highest form is so intoxicating you become unaware of the effect it has on you.  Dissenting opinions are brushed aside as uninformed second guessers.  Attention to obvious details are ignored.  A sense of superiority overcomes you in such a way that you feel there couldn't be any possible way of doing things other than yours. 
What other explaination could there be as to why the Saints were caught so off guard by the trickery of the Browns?  A coach on his game would have sensed during the week that a desperate 1-5 football team with a thrid string rookie QB just might have some slight of hand ready to"steal a possession" and keep the game close.  Afterall, that was Payton's calling card when the Saints were the hungry hunters.  But there were the Browns with one trick after another and Payton just staring in confused amazement. 
A coach like oh I don't know, Bill Walsh, would have realized that a former longtime player with quite possibly an ax to grind would help his coaches devise a gameplan designed to confuse and embarrass a hall of fame QB. Then maybe he'd make of an adjustment or two.  A coach still smelling the perfume would arrogantly ignore this and march on without any sense that changes are needed. But there were the Browns forcing what many consider the best QB in the NFL to throw a career high four interceptions.  Payton? No adjustments, just staring in confused amazement.
The signs of perfume smelling have been revealing themselves for weeks. It's why you let time cruely slip away in the closing minutes of a losing game that should never have been close to begin with.  It's as if there was stunned disbelief that his team was actually losing to a vastly inferior team.
The perfume smelling seems to have permeated through the team.  It's why a winless team with a rookie QB hangs around until the final play.  Offensive linemen block by reaching instead of doing what my biddy basketball players did: "Slide your feet"! Receivers fumble on the opponets one yard line, don't fight for the extra yard on third and short, give up on routes and drop pass after pass after pass.  Defensive backs go for picks when simply allowing a catch then making a tackle before the sticks would do.  And don't even get me started on field goal kickers!
Payton loves to refer to his most influental mentor, Bill Parcells, in times of adversity.  I couldn't think of a worse mentor.  While Parcels was a great coach, he took bunker mentality to extraodinary heights. He seemingly had a visceral distain for people outside of the"bunker". Something Payton seems to be doing now.  All this does is drive a wedge between the coach and his biggest PR department, the press.  Which in turn gets the fans going.  In New Orleans you want the fans on your side, believe me.
As for LSU, les miles managed to navigate his team bumbling,stumbling and fumbling to 7-0 and #6 ranking.  However his team and their #3 ranked defense ran into the most dominate player in college football and had no answer.  miles' problem continues to be deciding what to do with the QB situation.  Personally, I thought Jordan Jefferson had his best game of the season against Auburn considering it's magnitude.  His running style was the only part of the LSU offense they kept Auburn on their heels.  It seems to me that a coach on his game would go with the hot hand at QB and ride him until it cools off. Subbing QB's series to series without consideration of the flow of the game disrupts an offesne's best friend, rythmn.  Until he figures this out, LSU will continue to increase alcohol sales in Louisiana. But rest assured LSU fans ,ole les could never be accused of smelling the perfume.