It's a beautiful day

Something for all concerned Saints fans to chew on

Like most Who Dats, yesterday’s loss to the Bucs combined with last weekend’s loss to the Cowboys has me feeling a little deflated. After all, the football pundits are always crowing about how important it is to be playing your best football going into the playoffs in order to have any success in the playoffs. But here’s some recent history to keep in mind:

-The 2008 Super Bowl Champion New York Giants lost their last four home games and two out of their last three overall going into the playoffs.

-The 2007 Super Bowl Champion Indianapolis Colts were 2-3 in December.

-The team that barely lost in last year’s Super Bowl, the Arizona Cardinals, lost 4 of their last 6 games by a combined score of 167-70.

-The San Diego Chargers are 18-0 in December since 2006. The number of times they’ve been to the Super Bowl in that span…zero.

So is there reason to be concerned? Yes, absolutely, we’ve played, ugh, unwell of late. But is it time to panic? No, absolutely not.

But still…THE FUCKING BUCS?!?!?!

Image via Times-Picayune

"Shockey used to live upstairs. We're glad he's gone. We kept losing hostesses."

The soul of the city is all around me as I drive out Interstate 10. I've seen the things I came to see, felt what it was like during this time of madness in New Orleans. My wife is with me, and we're listening to the Saints game on the radio. She does not like football, but she loves New Orleans, and this is the first team she has ever cared about.

I think about all I've seen -- in the past week, in the years before -- and about the next game in the Dome. The Cowboys are coming to town. Some marketing guy decided in the '70s that they should be America's Team. It stuck, because they were good and because Dallas represented everything America thought about itself: big, consuming, flashy, bragging, unbeatable.

When I drive into Dallas, I see a place sprawling and bland, loops and rings of interstate and, somewhere over the horizon, a stadium representing a just-gone era of bloat and decay … scoreboard so big it interferes with the game … $60 pizzas. It looks new but is dead inside. In contrast, there is the drive out of New Orleans, through a city still battered, past the exits for the Vieux Carre and Uptown, past the Huey Long, which runs narrow and high out to the leaning oyster and chicken shack. All told, this is a city with the opposite calculus of Dallas: It is decayed on the outside, but inside there is life.

-I kinda wanted to hate this, thinking it’d be yet another cheesy “the Saints are saving New Orleans” cliche-laden essay, but Wright Thompson absolutely nailed it, leaving me with Goddamn tears in my eyes by the time I was finished reading the whole piece.

Thirteen and eaux

In the event you have any doubts as to how loved the Saints are by their fans, check out this video from WWL of THOUSANDS of fans greeting the team in the dead of night following a REGULAR SEASON GAME in Atlanta yesterday...



And behold, Breesus Maximus...

Disgruntled Skins Fan Lets Saints Fan Friends Shoot His TV

Yeah, this seems about right...



The AP also wrote a story about this incident.

This is just getting ridiculous

I snapped this pic of the Fed-Ex Field scoreboard about two seconds after Garrett Hartley’s field goal sailed through the uprights to win the game. It was almost as if I didn’t believe we had actually won and I needed to snap a picture of the scoreboard in order to have something tangible to prove to myself that yes, we did actually win that utterly amazing game in the most improbable of ways.

I still can’t fully wrap my brain around what I witnessed there on Sunday afternoon, and I doubt that I ever will, but there is one thing I’m 100% sure of…I’ll never forget being in that stadium on Sunday. It was pure madness…the range of emotions experienced and expressed by fans of both teams…you could actually feel the shift in momentum permeating throughout the stadium after Suisham missed the kick that would have iced the game for the Skins.

About all of this, I think Drew summed it up rather well in the post-game press conference:

"I believe in destiny, and I believe in karma and what goes around comes around. We've been on the other side of this deal, probably too many times. Maybe it's our time -- that we start catching some of the breaks, start being a team that wins 'em like this in the end."

12 and 0. This is, as I mentioned in the subject line, just getting ridiculous, but Goddamn it’s a fun wave to ride. WHO DAT!

Of course...

There's no way I could let the premiere of Jersey Shore pass without sharing a few words on the matter, which I posted at Animal. And no, I'm not one of the executive producers of the show, thank you very much.

Oh My F-ing God!!!

I don't think I've really felt that the 2009 Saints were "for real" until last night. I can hardly believe this is happening, but am having a hell of a lot of fun riding this wave. WHO DAT!!!