I know as Saints fans many of us are preconditioned to exclusively and without fail believe that Murphy’s law has a special addition in the small print that says “especially when it concerns the New Orleans Saints”. To be fair the history of the Saints tells us that this is a reasonable assumption and the odds are greatly in your favor. Heck Andrew Juge has been going over the “worst QB’s in Saints history” on the Happy Hour Podcast with the rest of the crew, and honestly it’s a pretty horrifying list. The history of bad luck, bad decisions, and ineptitude in Saints football lore is pretty expansive. HOWEVER, the past doesn’t dictate the future, and it shouldn’t cloud our views of the present either.
The reality is that the best time of the year, and honestly maybe the ONLY time of the year, where Saints fans should be brimming with confidence is training camp. It’s the time of year where every offensive player is a future superstar, and every tackle and batted pass is a sign of a defensive player who just might be good. The thing is, none of those thoughts are wrong. The young studs like Michael Thomas who get all the hype some times really ARE going to be stars, and sometimes a defensive player gets his name called a bunch and does turn out to be a very good player (remember Delvin Breaux anyone?). These things happen, and they happen more often than you might think. The Saints (contrary to popular opinion and what some others will tell you) have a very good base of talent now, but what they don’t have are proven players who have shown they can take talent and turn it into production. The Saints have potential, they have yet to prove they have substance.
But at least to me, half the fun in sports is looking at all that potential and imagining (and yes hoping) what it could be. There is a difference of course between optimism and unrealistic expectations. Expecting Edebali to turn into a 15 sack player is ridiculous, but thinking he can jump to 8 with more playing time isn’t that far fetched. Thinking that a young player like Tyeler Davison can build off of the flashes he showed last year and can become an effective nose tackle isn’t unrealistic. Neither is having high expectations of players who had first round talent such as the aforementioned Michael Thomas, or P.J. Williams. There isn’t anything unreasonable about hoping that players who clearly have the ability to help improve the team, can turn that ability into production. It’s ridiculous to demand, or believe it’s guarunteed, but hoping for it and acknowledging the possibility should be expected.
We should expect the offense to be incredible with arguably the greatest assembly of talent that it’s ever had, we should expect the defense to improve when its three biggest flaws from the prior year have all been addressed. In fact, we should expect the Saints to make some noise and possibly surprise us by winning the division. This is the same Saints team that was a fantastic play and a slightly under thrown ball away from beating last year’s NFC champs (and Super Bowl losers) in their house with our BACK UP QUARTERBACK. I’m not saying that everything is sunshine and daisies and the Saints are going 19-0, because I’m not an idiot. But I’m also not going to say that things as frivolous and unfounded as ‘the difficulty of the schedule’, or ‘the Saints history says…’ are reason enough to write the season off before it’s begun.
Saints fans, I know we enjoy our misery a little bit sometimes, but the reality is we only have a year or two left of this ‘Golden Era’ and frankly we should cherish the times where the mere presence of Brees and Payton at least gives us a shot, because soon at least one of them will be gone and likely our chance at another ring will go with it.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
