Sunday’s New Orleans Saints 33-14 loss to the Carolina Panthers is a friendly reminder exhibition football is as awful in December as it is in August.
The Saints showed less interest in winning Sunday than my 3-year-old does using the potty. If you didn’t know 3-year-old boys, let me tell you, using a bathroom holds little interest to them.
The Saints didn’t need to bother doing anything other than avoid serious injury Sunday and they did so, with a little scare thrown in.
The only drama Sunday was injury concerns for Sheldon Rankins, Alex Okafor, and Andrus Peat. The good news is only Peat’s hand injury looked like a serious issue. I won’t lie, when I saw Rankins being attended to early in first quarter, I wanted Sean Payton to throw the flag. Not the challenge flag, the white one. Forfeiting to avoid injury seemed like a sensible move at that very moment.
I did feel bad for Teddy Bridgwater. Teddy was running for his life most of the day as the Saints started 3 backups along the offensive line, including one guy signed this week. I’m surprised the Saints didn’t have a drawing before the game and give a lucky fan the in-game experience of a lifetime starting at offensive tackle.
The good news for Teddy is all that scrambling showed his knee is totally healed up! A smart team is going to sign him to be their quarterback.
The most interesting thing to me about Sunday was how angry Sean Payton was after the game. By his demeanor, you’d think the Saints just lost a playoff game, not a meaningless season finale.
“We could spin it any way we want to, but we didn’t play well.”
He went on, “We didn’t play well, and you’re upset about it. ... There’s nothing about it that’s good.”
Payton is acting as if the starters played significant snaps and were doing anything other than making sure not to get hurt.
I love a good conspiracy, so it seems to me Sean Payton might have orchestrated something straight out of Bill Parcells’ coaching handbook: make everyone in the building uncomfortable.
Funny how it just worked out perfectly Payton can drive the Saints hard for two weeks in meetings and, who knows, maybe the national media will even play along and identify the Saints as the team ripe to be upset at home.
Payton always says it’s either a “a carnival or a crisis”. Did Sean want a little crisis before the playoffs, so he manufactured one?
Cue the X-Files theme music.
Sean Payton didn’t become a successful coach by basking in the glow of accomplishments when the true objective has not yet been achieved.
The 2018 Saints just wrapped up maybe their best regular season in franchise history, but Sean Payton is acting like a 19-point loss in a meaningless game is the football equivalent of Gotti starring John Travolta.
Payton knows, of course, success for 2018 will be judged on if a Super Bowl is won, so every lever must be pushed, every motivational tactic used.
The 2018 Saints regular season was fun, amazing, engrossing, and Sean Payton managed to even make the inconsequential finale compelling.
God, this Saints season was spectacular.
Ralph Malbrough is a Saints fan living in Houston. Email him at saintshappyhour@gmail.com, find him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SaintsForecast or download his podcast at iTunes.