The Report: Saints season opening edition
Friday, 05 September 2008 10:08
The Exile's Blog
NEWS ITEM: The LPGA announced that all its golfers must be able to speak some minimum level of English by next year.
Sadly, if this had been the NFL in 1987, the Saints would have had to cut both Bobby Hebert and Rickey Jackson.
In WWL’s race to the bottom, when they hired Hebert as a radio host, they misinterpreted the love for predecessor hosts Hap Glaudi and Buddy Diliberto, two respected former print and TV journalists with inadvertently comical radio personas. It wasn’t just that Glaudi and Diliberto were locals who talked funny and said weird things, it was that they worked hard to get the story right and weren’t afraid of confrontation. Just because Hebert is from Galliano, LA and played for the Saints after completing Northwestern State University’s famous Logorrhea/Bizarre Colloquialism joint degree program doesn’t make up for the fact that he can’t properly host a radio show, even one about a single NFL team.
Rickey, on the other hand, is my all-time favorite Saint, and even if I could never understand a single thing he ever said, I always knew he was right, and that I agreed with him.
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AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST: The NFC South has this bizarre pattern of the previous year’s winner never winning the division the following year (and in fact usually missing the playoffs altogether), with winner instead usually the previous year’s worst team. And there’s no team I’m going to enjoy breaking that pattern this year rather than the Atlanta Falcons.
On the other hand, if you’re going to have a division with so much emphasis and interest on who finishes last, I’m not sure you could have picked better franchises to stock it than the Falcons, the Saints, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. On a historical basis, the NFC South race usually ends up looking like a tallest midget contest.
As far as who’s going to win it this year, my money is on the Saints, while noting that these teams usually make a habit of spoiling each other’s picnics. For instance in 2002, the year the Bucs won the Super Bowl, we swept them. Last year, when we had such high hopes and were trying to shake off the effects of a season-opening loss to the defending Super Bowl champs, they just beat the hell out of us.
The Saints-Bucs rivalry might be one of the cleanest regional rivalries around, at least based on reports of fans from both cities who visit the others’ stadium for a road game, and the unusual level of mutual respect on the teams’ official and unofficial message boards. There seems to be a tacit acknowledgement of the shared history of losing, having your team always on the wrong side of the highlights, and seeing too much of your heroes in the football follies shows. While not enough tragedy can befall the 49ers and Falcons, as long as it’s not directly at my expense, it doesn’t bother me when the Bucs have some success.
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NEWS ITEM: The Boston Celtics sign free agent forward Darius Miles to a contract, as Miles attempts a comeback after a two-year absence recovering from injury.
As a lifelong Celtics fan, I can tell you that nothing says “old school”, “tradition” and “fundamentals” like acquiring a player whose nickname is Spaceman and who, if he makes the team, will start out by finally serving an old 10-game suspension.
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NEWS ITEM: New Lions RB Rudi Johnson shows up at Lions headquarters where, in an apparent fit of pique, Tatum Bell, the RB released by the Lions when they got Johnson, allegedly made off with Johnson’s luggage.
There is no truth to the rumor that, in honor of his friend and former Bengals teammate Chad Ocho Cinco (ne Johnson), Rudi Johnson will in lieu of financial damages require his alleged antagonist to change his name to Tatum Bell Boy.
You know, I don’t know what makes me happier, that I got to crank in another wrenchingly horrible pun, or that I got to use “fit of pique” while writing about the NFL.
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PLUS CA CHANGE.....: These Saints/Bucs games are now always death struggles, as if two starving and blindfolded sumo wrestlers were grappling in a phone booth for the sole ownership of a pizza. (I see it now: 18-year-old kid reading this and wondering, “What’s a phone booth?”)
I have a lot of respect for Bucs coach Jon Gruden. It’s not the Super Bowl win, the well-publicized sideline game-day grimaces, or the misplaced “offensive guru” label, but that even his worst Bucs teams have always seemed to be well-prepared and to play hard, and that when they had the inevitable, salary-cap driven lapse years after their Super Bowl win in 2002, he never complained or talked about rebuilding, his teams just showed up and played.
Critics point to his having in Tampa Bay the services of the great defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, who also served as such for Tony Dungy, Gruden’s predecessor, but Gruden and Kiffin obviously mesh at some meaningful level, and these Bucs teams clearly have Gruden’s stamp, and they remain one of the better overall franchises in the NFL.
The Bucs/Saints games in recent years have often seemed to fall in a range where the winner scores no more than 24 points and the loser no less than 14, with one or two mistakes or big plays usually providing the difference. This week should not be any different, as one would certainly expect the Bucs to be well-prepared, to take care of the ball, to run it a little bit and to look for one or two timely shots downfield that have killed the Saints in past losses.
If you’re looking for a breakout game for Saints RB Reggie Bush, this won’t be it, either: the Bucs’ cover-2 defense and fast linebackers cover the flats far too well, and their overall defensive team speed matches up too well with him. On the other hand, the way for the Saints to win has always been for them to hit the Bucs in the mouth and run right at them, so we should get an early indication of how far back RB Deuce McAllister is from his knee injuries of last year, and whether or not our OL can get any more push in the running game than it did last year.
Meanwhile, this is a “Brees game,” as a larger onus than usual will be on Saints QB Drew Brees to make quick and correct decisions in the short passing game, which is the Saints basic offense and most likely how they will have their success moving the ball on Sunday. The Bucs’ defensive thesis is to make you work the ball downfield, not giving up large chunks of yardage, and if Brees is off-rhythm or off-target, the Saints’ resulting start-and-halt of the offense will be more critical than usual.
My prediction is that the difference this time will be an improved Saints defense. The Saints have been pretty consistent against the run the last two years, even when other elements of the defense weren’t working so well, which should limit Tampa’s ability to grind the clock and set up the deep passing game. And as long as Jason David doesn’t see any meaningful playing at cornerback, we should limit somewhat the savaging from any downfield attack, and that should be enough.
Saints 24, Bucs 14.
GO SAINTS GO!
p.s. Nailed the Giants game last night, an admitted no-brainer, so a 1-0 start to picking against the spread.
Next week: a review of the season opener, and a well-researched thought piece on whether Dick “Night Train” Lane had the coolest NFL nickname of all time.
