NEW ORLEANS — The 2023 New Orleans Saints did the most 2023 Saints thing in losing to the Atlanta Falcons -- they had horrible penalties, turnovers, and injuries to die the most agonizing, yet predictable football death as their season begins the long slow circling around the drain.
The Saints are again playing in the worst division in the NFL and against Tampa Bay and Atlanta, the two teams they are fighting against to be king of Trash Mountain, they have a grand total of eight field goals in eight quarters of football.
Not great.
The Saints continue to treat the red zone like I do my plan to get in shape during the holidays – some good intentions, baby steps in the right direction, but in the end, bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. In this analogy, Derek Carr’s interception and Taysom Hill’s fumble are the equivalent of me telling myself, “This year the holidays will be different. I won’t eat five pieces of pumpkin cheesecake.”
I ate the entire cheesecake.
The Saints had 444 yards of offense, ran for 148 yards, had the ball the 31 minutes, and punted just once. They scored 15 points. We can’t even really blame the red zone struggles on not giving the ball to Taysom Hill. He had seven carries but also a back-breaking fumble on the drive where the Saints looked poised to take the lead.
The Saints moved the ball up and down the field in the second half without Chris Olave, Michael Thomas, Rashid Shaheed, and center Eric McCoy because they were all out injured. The only thing more remarkable than the Saints somehow patching a workable offense together while they were hit with what should have been crippling injuries was their ability to step on land mines while jamming a fork into every electrical outlet they could locate.
It was a truly remarkable demonstration of self-destruction. If the Saints could have just not lit themselves on fire, they probably win. Sunday reminded me of the Chicago Bears game. In that game the Saints didn’t play particularly well, but they had no turnovers and one penalty. Against the Falcons the Saints had two turnovers inside the Falcons' 10-yard line and six penalties, including critical holding penalties which killed great drives.
When we write the epilogue for the Dennis Allen era it’ll be, “It was always something.”
Good NFL teams start by not giving games away with dumb penalties and turnovers. The Saints have shown under Allen they have no ability to do this.
Alvin Kamara was frustrated after but also looked like a guy who has no answers, "I just feel like there's too much talking, talking about what we 'need' to look like. We need to find a real fix, not just 'Oh we gotta be better.' We want to get better every week. That's obvious. Let's get past that. How are we going to get better?"
Sorry to break it to you Alvin, but nothing is going to get fixed, cause if solutions haven’t been located by Week 12, either there are no solutions to be found or y’all are just not capable of executing the solutions to the problems.
While we’ve been obsessing all year about why the offense with a new quarterback and a nice roster of weapons can’t consistently crack 20 points, the defense has quietly begun to implode.
The Saints gave up 228 yards rushing to the Falcons. The most depressing aspect was that of Atlanta’s last 19 plays, 16 were runs, including their final 10 plays on the drive which salted away the victory.
Falcon’s coach Arthur Smith wasn’t lying when he told Fox sideline reporter Pam Oliver at half time, “We are going to kick their @$$!”
There are few things in football more demoralizing than the, “We are going to run this ball down your throat and there’s not a thing you can do about it. “
In the last 3 games against the Saints, the Falcons have rushed for 660 yards on 118 carries. That’s complete domination of the line of scrimmage. How the Saints are 2-1 in those games defies logic.
Arthur Smith decided to hide his terrible quarterback during the biggest game of the Falcons season, and there wasn’t anything Dennis Allen could do to stop it.
The Saints season just 3 short weeks ago after a win against Chicago felt like it at least had possibilities of fun down the stretch. A division title and even the playoffs seemed very possible, even likely.
Now, the talk will be about changes, firings, rebuilds, and tanking. All the little lies fans of bad teams tell ourselves so we can believe the future of our team is better than its present.
Change will come, but not soon enough, and as my friend Skooks said on Twitter, “There’s still 6 games left. I’m sorry, Ralph, but we aren’t dismissed yet. They’re gonna make us watch the rest of this.”
The 2023 Saints are some sort of unfair punishment that we don’t deserve but can’t escape.
Ralph Malbrough is a contributing writer and Saints fan living in Houston. Email him at saintshappyhour@gmail.com, find him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter at @SaintsForecast or download the Saints Happy Hour Podcast.