What a great story the Saints were last year. A year after Hurricane Katrina basically left them and millions others homeless, the Saints came marching back in and became a beacon of hope for their rebuilding city, coming within one game of the Super Bowl. For anybody who says sports don’t mean anything should take a look at the 2006 Saints season and its effect on the people of the city, particularly the Monday night game at the Superdome on September 25. If you didn’t get goosebumps during that game, you are a mean, heartless soul.
This year will tell us whether or not The Saints have reemerged as an NFL power or if last season’s success was due to a ton of my favorite sports cliche, playing on emotion.
They certainly won’t surprise anyone this year. The league now knows that Sean Payton can coach in the NFL, Drew Brees can still play quarterback after the elbow injury, Marques Colston should have been drafted much earlier than he was (second to last), and that there’s at least one Bush that has the best in mind for New Orleans.
Though their offensive line doesn’t get much love, no team can put up points the way The Saints did last year with a line that can’t block. Similarly, their defense gets no respect but they were the third ranked NFC defense last year in points per game trailing only the Bears and the Panthers. Sure, they could improve on their takeaways and giving up 20 points a game isn’t that great but if you can score 21, who cares?
Which leads us back to the offense: Deuce McAllister brings the power to the running game while Reggie Bush brings the finesse. Colston may find it a little more difficult to get open now with Joe Horn catching passes with troubled Falcons but with a good core of big wide receivers like Devery Henderson, David Patten, and Robert Meachem, we fully expect the loss to be offset. If new tight end (and Yalie) Eric “The Smart Hotness, aka The Smartness” Johnson can stay healthy, he could be a great safety valve for Brees and put together a very solid season.
And besides, would you bet that Bush isn’t going to further improve and become even more of a playmaker? Yeah, neither would we. Barring some sort of epic rise of David Carr, Joey Harrington, or Jeff Garcia, the dirrrty south belongs to the Saints. All together now, “Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?”
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