The Exile's Report: A good day to be home

Friday, 12 September 2008 07:38

The Exile's Blog

It was great to be home in New Orleans, especially when it involved beating the Bucs in your home opener and a Bourbon Street balcony party. 



The weekend was a little more special post-Gustav; the post-Gustav era almost felt like an old-fashioned hurricane aftermath, when everybody dealt with life’s batterings with an ice chest and a few minutes at the house of some lucky ******* who already had his air conditioning back.  And then you remembered Katrina, and how yesterday’s pre-hurricane excitement is now, and for the next two generations, tomorrow’s grim determination and dread.

But the post-Katrina world is not without its tender mercies.  For instance, try meeting up with somebody around the Dome before or after a Saints game without an agreed meeting place and time nailed down to within 20 square feet.  Forget it, it’s like short-haircut day at a Catholic high school.  You just can’t find anybody because everybody looks pretty much the same, black-on-black, except for maybe small differences in the big-frame sunglasses on the women and the baseball caps on the men.

It used to be that some fanatics at Saints games wore jerseys, or a black shirt of some kind, and a few wackos had a costume.  All the nice club level people wore golf shirts of fascinating patterns and colors, and other than a few women in the occasional gold lame vest, regular clothes in varying degrees of nice.  Looked like another day at the Lakeside Mall.

Now, nobody gets caught dead at a Saints game without the colors on, if not a full-on Saints jersey.  Nobody.  An utter and complete community transformation; it’s like one day 70,000 people all just woke up and decided to become Crips.  Every male under the age of 35, and plenty over, has a jersey – 9, 25, 26, 88, 12, a few 94s in there, a couple of 87s, and the occasional old-school 8.   Non-jersey types sport the black polo or t-shirt. 

Your old Garden District white ladies formerly disdainful of such lower-caste distractions now show up de rigeur in a black knit top (plus sweater for the a/c) and a big old gold fleur-de-lis pendant that Fitty Cent would reject as gaudy. Any non-Saints gear stands out like Marine Rescue Orange.

Pride? Community? Defiance?  Fashion sense?  Hard to say exactly.  Maybe we’re all a little scared to be alone on this one and nobody knows how to say it, and this is how we all hold hands.

There is a bizarrely desperate yet rational love for the team now.  Saints fans don’t get quite as crazy at the results as they used to, because they’ve seen absolute insanity and know it for what it is.  But they’ve also seen loss, and the loss of the Saints at this point would in its own context be a profound, absolute loss, and nobody can stand the thought of that kind of loss again right now.

So they make sure they’ve got that jersey on.

Mine’s a white no. 9.

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Apologies for the lateness of the first blog this week, but ridiculous travel difficulties are largely to blame.  There were two sights during my layover in Hartsfield as compensation for landing at 2 a.m.

First, I crossed paths (actually, opposing escalators) with Evander Holyfield, by himself and wearing a t-shirt that said “Holyfield – Warrior.”  (I now feel like I have to get a t-shirt that says “The Exile – Exile.”)

The second was a guy about in his twenties, approximately 57 pounds overweight, eating a bowl of ice cream while enjoying a free ride in the floor model of the Brookstone massage chair.

Dude.

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Seeing how well rookie CB Tracy Porter played on Sunday, I realized it’s been a long time since a rookie CB started a season opener for the Saints.  Robert Massey, the second round pick in 1989, started all 16 games for us and had five picks.  (You just HAVE to love the internet.)  Unfortunately, he was gone after one more season, although later he did make the Pro Bowl with the Cardinals.  (What the hell were we thinking?)  Here’s hoping Porter, who as far as I can tell/remember is only the second rookie CB ever to start a Saints season opener, has a longer arc to his Saints career than Jamie-Lynn on Zoey 101.

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Sunday’s win was a reversal of a lot of the Bucs games of the past.  What started out as a Big Ten defensive struggle from the 1950s turned into an ABA game for the last 17 minutes, when neither team could stop the other.  I’m still scratching my head about the number of 20+ yard plays we got against the Bucs, and the Saints’ TDs of 39, 42 and 84 yards.

Meanwhile, the Bucs, who normally scorch us with a couple of key big plays, got none, but were able to grind out four drives in the last 17 minutes.  Their key was figuring out that our secondary, particularly minus CBs Mike McKenzie and Usama Young (and then Randall Gay, who started but missed some plays late), are really weak tacklers, and they focused on getting to the edges with simple short passes to TB Earnest Graham and their bigger WRs Antonio Bryant and Ike Hilliard, and TE Alex Smith, who broke tackles and pulled our guys along for 10 yards a pop.

I’m not sure how you address this, other than getting at least McKenzie, Young and Gay back onto the field, or taking your chances with a lot more press coverage, but reserve CBs Jason Craft and Aaron Glenn don’t have all that much catchup speed any more.

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On offense, somehow the team picked up 438 yards against a very well-coached defense, and despite having terrible starting field position most of the day.  Other than the kneeldown drives at the end of each half, the Saints started their 12 drives on an average of their own 19 yard line, with six inside their own 20 and four of those inside their own 10, including one right in the middle of the Poydras St. neutral ground.

Just to illustrate what field position can do, in addition to limiting your choice of plays when you don’t have any, the Bucs started their 13 drives on an average of their own 27 yard line.  This doesn’t seem like a huge difference until you multiply it by 12.5 and come up with 100 yards.

When you factor that against the Saints’ 438-352 edge in total yards for the game, the real difference, which was the Saints’ ability to get big plays resulting in TDs, is what stands out.  The fact that the Bucs don’t have anybody like Reggie Bush or Devery Henderson, who are a real threat to score from anywhere on the field, and Porter’s knocking down a third-down pass in the end zone versus Buc CB Aqib Talib’s mistimed leap on QB Drew Brees’s TD pass to WR David Patten were the difference between winning and losing another standard-issue Saints-Bucs game.

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An excellent opening week for Dr. Ex against the spread, 9-7, up $130, as opposed to my usual 4-11-1 or some such.

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Later this week:  we address Sunday’s game at the Redskins, and consider how we somehow take last Sunday’s all-too-brief in-stadium screen shot of two attractive young women dancing in the stands who suddenly turned and kissed each other, and develop it into a whole new concept of “Rally Monkey.”