There is a thread here about people saying how this season feels like the 2009 Saints season. For me, 2009 had a real solid feeling, a definitive sense that we would win the Super Bowl. I never doubted, ever.
With this year's team, I see the work in progress of which one poster wrote and I couldn't put it better. Each week we are seeing a newness, a freshness that is largely due to the young, so-called "no name" players both on Defense and Offense. The up and coming are beginning to forge for themselves a significant place, their particular role within the larger picture of the entire team.
There is a real sense of team that I think is unique to this 2013 Saints team. I believe it has been as a direct result of the undeserved hardship that Goodell laid on our team and its leaders with that trumped up so-called bounty mess.
Starting with Coach Payton (though he has repeatedly said he's moved on and, while I believe he has had to out of necessity, that doesn't mean that it has been forgotten), nobody who was on the team last year will ever forget the devastation brought about by Goodell's cowardly smear campaign. I guess that's what I see as the biggest difference in how it "feels" this year compared to 2009.
To me, this year feels like anything can happen, and the Saints are painstakingly and deliberately paving the road with caution as well as exuberance, knowing that from the very first snap of the very first regular season game, they have been taking the League by surprise (at least most of the talking heads, as well as many of us who had no idea what to expect of the defense).
When Payton decided to kick the field goal last week when the offense was unable to get into the end zone (after the Jenkins sack with Jordan's fumble recovery), I was impressed because I thought he would go for it like he had a tendency to do in the past.
But he is a changed man. All because of what happened last season and what he has gone through personally, the least of which was neither his divorce nor his forced loss of contact with his closest friends, his players and anyone else in the NFL with whom he normally could speak on a daily basis. I cannot begin to imagine what kind of hell that must have been for him. But it has taught him how to be more patient, in ways he has never been as a coach until now.
Under his patient tutelage, not only are the players blossoming, but so too is Rob Ryan. The sum total of what used to be carnage is now becoming a unit that is determined to let nothing stop it from doing its utmost on every down, on every snap. That determination will continue to play a huge factor each week as the team ripens under the strong leadership of Payton, Ryan and Brees.
A team will always reflect its leader. Sean Payton has always known how to lead. Now he knows how to lead in a new way, a way tempered by the harshness of last season's debacle. That is why I feel this year is wide open for this amazingly resilient team. Sean Payton instills a renewed sense of calm confidence and hope in me as a fan.
I believe. This year is a special year. Even if it doesn't feel like 2009 to me. Vive la difference! I am enjoying the ride immensely.
Who Dat! Geaux Saints!!!
With this year's team, I see the work in progress of which one poster wrote and I couldn't put it better. Each week we are seeing a newness, a freshness that is largely due to the young, so-called "no name" players both on Defense and Offense. The up and coming are beginning to forge for themselves a significant place, their particular role within the larger picture of the entire team.
There is a real sense of team that I think is unique to this 2013 Saints team. I believe it has been as a direct result of the undeserved hardship that Goodell laid on our team and its leaders with that trumped up so-called bounty mess.
Starting with Coach Payton (though he has repeatedly said he's moved on and, while I believe he has had to out of necessity, that doesn't mean that it has been forgotten), nobody who was on the team last year will ever forget the devastation brought about by Goodell's cowardly smear campaign. I guess that's what I see as the biggest difference in how it "feels" this year compared to 2009.
To me, this year feels like anything can happen, and the Saints are painstakingly and deliberately paving the road with caution as well as exuberance, knowing that from the very first snap of the very first regular season game, they have been taking the League by surprise (at least most of the talking heads, as well as many of us who had no idea what to expect of the defense).
When Payton decided to kick the field goal last week when the offense was unable to get into the end zone (after the Jenkins sack with Jordan's fumble recovery), I was impressed because I thought he would go for it like he had a tendency to do in the past.
But he is a changed man. All because of what happened last season and what he has gone through personally, the least of which was neither his divorce nor his forced loss of contact with his closest friends, his players and anyone else in the NFL with whom he normally could speak on a daily basis. I cannot begin to imagine what kind of hell that must have been for him. But it has taught him how to be more patient, in ways he has never been as a coach until now.
Under his patient tutelage, not only are the players blossoming, but so too is Rob Ryan. The sum total of what used to be carnage is now becoming a unit that is determined to let nothing stop it from doing its utmost on every down, on every snap. That determination will continue to play a huge factor each week as the team ripens under the strong leadership of Payton, Ryan and Brees.
A team will always reflect its leader. Sean Payton has always known how to lead. Now he knows how to lead in a new way, a way tempered by the harshness of last season's debacle. That is why I feel this year is wide open for this amazingly resilient team. Sean Payton instills a renewed sense of calm confidence and hope in me as a fan.
I believe. This year is a special year. Even if it doesn't feel like 2009 to me. Vive la difference! I am enjoying the ride immensely.
Who Dat! Geaux Saints!!!