A few words on Will Smith

This is the space where Marijn and I typically spend our week ranting and raving over largely minor bs … this week, we decided to just spend a second talking about the loss of Will Smith. It just didn’t feel right to add anything else when it was done.

Brian Bauer (@saintbrian9)

There’s a part of me that can’t believe I’m writing this. I sit here in my office, looking for the right words to describe a player I spent a decade rooting for, a player who was considerably younger than me. Will Smith was murdered for whatever silly reason on April 9, and immediately his era – the best era in Saints history – felt a lot more dented.

Maybe that’s why it hurts as bad as it does. Smith was the beginning of a cast of guys that just felt “right.” You couldn’t say why or how at the time, but he had the ability and desire of someone the Saints rarely wound up with. So to watch him evolve as a player – and rather quickly mind you – was the type of thing that gave us as fans an intangible sort of hope. The kind of player that made it feel possible, perhaps optimistically, that someday we would see a Super Bowl celebrated in New Orleans.

Eventually, more Will Smith’s would show up – guys like Johnathan Vilma, Scott Fujita, Marques Colston, Drew Brees – (there’s plenty more, but there’s no reason to restate what we all remember so fondly) and with a like-minded coach, that Super Bowl indeed happened. There’s been a lot things since that moment that feel like fate trying to take back some of those good vibes – things like the bounty scandal and Darren Sharper.

This is worse. So very much worse. As the days and weeks and months reach forward, the defense’s lawyer is certainly going to try and dig up as much garbage as he can – it’s his job, and the right of the accused – and we will likely, at the very least, read something or hear something that attempts to stain what we felt about Smith and his time in New Orleans. It’s part of the process and I suspect this will get worse before it gets better. In the end though, it doesn’t matter. Because when we look back on the magical 2009 season, we will always feel a tinge of sadness. Watch the highlights of Tracy Porter’s immortal pick 6 and you can’t miss Smith, rolling Manning down the field in the background. His fingerprints are all over that team, and it’s awful that not only is he gone, but that it happened the way it did. And it certainly doesn’t help that for me, Smith was just a kid – a guy, only 34 years old, a full 7 years my junior. Will Smith is gone, and so too is a part of the New Orleans Saints, and their greatest era …

Marijn Pessers (@Monedula_)

After a week of nothing happening, now everything has happened. Too much. Stuff we did not think about or wanted to think about.

One of the greatest Saints ever has left us in a terrible way. I don’t know what to say more than what has already been said by so many people. It is good to see guys like Roddy White and even Junior Galette respect the man and his career. Something like this makes us see that rivalry is just petty and when bad shit happens the rivalry goes right out of the door. Mostly. Some people just tweet out stuff that should get them fired from their job. But let’s not go into the negative.

What Will Smith meant for me: I started watching the NFL in 2009 and back then, the only thing I knew is QBs, RBs and WRs. Defense is just meh. But in the years that I have become a Jugean I have learned a lot about football. I still do not know what to look at exactly when looking at linemen. But for me Will Smith was solid. He was a guy that when he was healthy is your starter. No doubt. I think that when I try to judge any DE I would compare them to Will Smith. That is the guy you want to draft every time even if you already have 4 starting capable DEs on the roster and I think that is what the Saints saw in him back in 2004 when they drafted him.

He was younger than I am and from the reports coming out that he would be a coach on the Saints. I am so saddened because I would have really liked him to see him be an awesome guy for the Saints in the future. He was the Saints personified.