As most know, the hardest thing to do in sports is to defend a Super Bowl championship. Especially your first. Your team is asked to do that which is completely foreign to them. After receiving enormous adjulation from fans, media and contemporaries, they must battle complaceny, apathy, injuries and if that's not enough, every team's best shot. Every week.
In short, the Super Bowl hangover.
Now in New Orleans we know all about hangovers. They can range from mild (1 Advil) to severe (5 Advils) on the K&B Hangover Rx Scale.
Ask the Baltimore Ravens(4) and Tampa Bay Bucs(5), teams that failed to qualify for the playoffs after winning their Super Bowls then bounced around never to return and the Bucs sinking to a 3-13 season. Ask New England and Pittsburg (3) who after winning their Super Bowls, failed to qualify for the playoffs but rebounded to win the big game again. Then there's Peyton Manning's Colts (1), who won their division but lost the their playoff opener the year after their Super Bowl win. It's just tough.
So the New Orleans Saints finished their first post Super Bowl regular season a respectful 11-5 and qualified for a wildcard berth. 11 wins and playoffs automatically eliminates five Advil status. However a look at the losses revealed a lingering hangover looming early in the season which might have doomed a lesser team.
Let's take a look.
In week 3, crucial turnovers by Drew Brees and a hungover Garrett Hartley missed a gimme 29 yard field goal attempt in overtime ending Sean Payton's mastery of Atlanta. A miss that would prove monumental as the season played out. 3 Advils
Week 5 was perhaps the worst in the Payton era. Losing to a very bad Phoenix Cardinals team featurng a first time wristband reading starting quarterback named Max Hall. A team who would go on to lose 11 games and become cellar dwellers of the woefull NFC West. 5 Advils and an Alka Seltzer
Week 7 came after a 31-7 beat down of division rival Tampa Bay. The floundering 1-5 Cleveland Browns came to town wanting a piece of the Super Bowl champs. They got more than a piece as they befuddled SB MVP Drew Brees into his worst performance as a Saint. Brees threw two pic6's to a DL bearing a name earily close to that of his newborn son. They were preceeded by a costly drive killing INT to cast off LB and former NO fan fave Scott Fajita. All to a team that would close 2010 with 11 losses. Hangover?! This looked more like an overdose! 5 Advils and 4 drops of Visine.
The metal of the champions were indeed being tested.
Displayng the heart of champions, though, they responded. Ripping off six straight wins including a Sunday night home win against Pittsburg and a Monday Night Footbal win on the road in Atlanta which positioned them for a shot at the #1 seed in the playoffs.
Losing to the Ravens in Baltimore in December ended that dream of repeating as #1 seed in the NFC playoffs. 4 Advils and a heating pad.
Losing a meaningless regular season finally to Tampa normally wouldn't mean much, but with three starters going down to injuries, this could spell doom in the playoffs. 4 1/2 Advils and 2 Vicadin.
Struggling with a once reliable receiving corps that dropped more passes than Wil I Am drops beats, an offensive line that averaged mutilple holding penaties per game and provided Brees with little time, injuries to runninng backs Lionel Hamilton, Pierre Thomas, Reggie Bush, and Chris Ivory, Drew Brees threw a career high 22 interceptions but also a miraculous NFC high 34 td passes. The offense finished 2010 ranked 6th total and 3rd passing. 2 1/2 Advils
Defensively, the Saints ranked a Sean Payton alltime high 5th in the league going into the season finally, however failed to muster up the game changing turnovers created during their run to the Super Bowl. Nowhere was this more dramatic than interceptions. The Saints were 3rd in the NFL in 2009 with 26 int's, returning 5 for touchdowns compared to 9 pics and 2 for td's in 2010. OUCH! That's a 4 Advil by itself! The defense did however see the emergence of second year DB Malcom Jenkins into a legit NFL safety but perhaps the fading of all time great Darren Sharper. 2 Advils
As the playoffs loom, the Saints face a new challenge, no home playoff games. However, the Saints played better on the road this season at 6-2, including a huge victory in the Georgia Dome.
As hangovers go, I'd rate the regular season a 2 out of 5, with 5 being a losing season as the Saints did finish with 11 wins but failed to win their division and lock up home field advantage.
Now it's on to the playoffs and a new beginning. We'll see what the champs are made of.
And if the hangover worsens or fades away...
I couldn’t agree more Mike. If you add up all those Advil’s and take into consideration all the unmentionables, most fans would have had to make two trips to the pharmacy this year. If you couple that with the ice packs, heating pads, some serious caffeine, alcohol and nerve pills, I think it's safe to say that it's been a great year for the local K&B substitute players. So let's pass the chips and brace ourselves for some action packed, suspense filled any-given-Sunday kind of post season…, where the slates are cleaned and polished for the finale. One which may turn out to be quite slippery in those Isotoner slippers that we received this Christmas. .... Dale Grimsal....
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