Great Expectations

This morning in Indianapolis preparations are underway for the now annual festival of gaudy excess that has become the NFL's opening game. Prior to the kickoff of tonight's game between the Saints and Colts, football fans will be treated to 30 minutes of entertainment with all the style and class that we expect from the National Football League. The pregame show, NFL OPENING KICKOFF 2007 PRESENTED BY SPRINT, will be available via your Sprint mobile phone/TV gizmo that the NFL and Sprint are expecting you to immediately run out and buy. It will also feature additional conspicuous advertising for PEPSI, GMC, and COORS. There will be performances by such artistic luminaries as FAITH HILL, KELLY CLARKSON, JOHN MELLENCAMP, and also HINDER. Wait minute... what the fuck is HINDER? Oh I see. I assume from that website they're the latest incarnation of the Backstreet Boys. Wow, what an interesting name for a boy band.

When I was growing up, it was often said that the idiotic hype surrounding the Super Bowl could be seen as an indication of the runaway excess, bombast, and plasticity of American popular culture. Cultural critics would point to the obscenity of this annual festering of commercial puss bursting out around a football game and wonder aloud about where it all went wrong. And that was all well and good at the time. But these days knocking the Super Bowl hype is... well.... passe. In fact, by today's standards, the Super Bowl bluster is at least justified by the fact that the championship game actually carries some degree of import within the context of the sport. Tonight's idiocy coagulates around what is only the first of 16 equally relevant minor football games this weekend. And yet we've reached a point where even this occasion demands HINDER via wireless broadcast. The frightening thought is in another twenty years there will undoubtedly exist an event stupid enough to make this seem okay by comparison.

This is only fitting since the twenty year cycle is the theme of the day in South Louisiana. Previously on the Yellow Blog we have touched upon the intriguing threads of commonality between the circumstances surrounding the 2007 and 1987 Louisiana Gubernatorial races. We plan to return to this theme in upcoming episodes but today it is our football, similarly stuck in the late 1980s, that we wish to discuss. Going into this season expectations among fans of the New Orleans Saints and the LSU Tigers are higher than they've been at any point since 1988.

The 1988 Tigers had recently completed a run of reasonably successful seasons under Bill Arnsparger during which they competed in two Sugar Bowls. Arnsparger was a defensive technician with an NFL background who was also something of a nomad. His tenure in Baton Rouge lasted only three seasons but when he left he had built a powerful national championship contender to leave his successor Mike Archer. In 1987, Arnsparger's team took Archer to a 10 win debut season and finished ranked number 5 in the country. Great things were expected of Archer's 1988 squad but those expectations were not to be realized. The Tigers finished with four losses including an inexcusable 44-3 embarrassment at home against Miami. Over the next three seasons, Archer's inability to recruit and overall general idiocy drove the LSU program into a rut from which it would not recover for nearly a decade.

This year the Tigers enter ranked number 2 nationally and the parallels between this season and '88 are striking. LSU has again recently undergone a coaching change from a nomadic defensive technician with an NFL background who built the program into a title contender to a guy with... somewhat unsettling clownish tendencies who has already failed to land one major local recruit. Is Les Miles the second coming of Mike Archer? This weekend's match-up with Virginia Tech will be the first true measure of whether or not the Tigers are headed for another free-fall.

In 1987 the New Orleans Saints enjoyed unprecedented success. After 20 years the team had carved its niche in the city's cultural fabric as one of the sports world's all-time most loveable losers. New Orleans loves football, and New Orleans loves parties. Sure it'd be nice to win sometimes but, to Saints fans, winning always seemed as unlikely as it was far from the point of the event in the first place. Over two decades, the Saints did not once finish a season with more wins than losses. But nonetheless, the team thrived. For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, never was a child more aware of the unique flavor of life in New Orleans than during Carnival, and again during football season. Which is why in 1987, when the Saints finally did enjoy their first winning season and their first playoff berth, the accompanying emotional output electrified the city and the entire region. Sure, the team would experience ups and downs over the next twenty years, but nothing would quite match the exuberance of the '87 season until.... well, you know.

The breakthrough success of the '87 Saints set the table for unprecedented expectations of the 1988 team. But, as was the case with the Tigers, these expectations went largely unfulfilled. The '88 Saints finished at a respectable 10-6 but missed the playoffs after faltering badly down the stretch. The following years proved particularly frustrating for Saints fans as a series of teams with championship talent were repeatedly held back by their arrogant, abrasive, stubborn coach. Were it not for the sublime lunacy of Mike Ditka's tenure in New Orleans, the award for worst football coach of my lifetime would have to go to Jim Mora. On second thought, scratch that. At least Ditka was funny. Mora was a humorless pompous asshole and the worst coach I've ever had to watch ruin a football team.

And perhaps that's where this parallel ends. Not only is current Saints coach Sean "Soupy" Payton somewhat less of a jerk than Mora, his refreshing lack of stubbornness gives us hope that he can avoid making the kinds of mistakes with this team that Mora made with his. With his final roster move of this preseason, Payton did something Mora would never have done. He admitted a mistake. Payton cut his fourth round draft choice Antonio Pittman, admitting that the running back had been outplayed by free agent rookie Pierre Thomas. This is the kind of clear-eyed decision making Payton will need if he wishes to overcome the burden of 2007's great expectations.

The Saints enter 2007 in the same position they exited 2006, as the darlings of the national sports media. The vast majority of preseason prognosticators expect the Saints to go deep into the playoffs. Several, including Sports Illustrated, have them actually winning the Super Bowl. Many of your duller sports media types have an annoying penchant for writing about the many ways in which they perceive sports to be some sort of poetic metaphor for real life. I don't know about that, but I can tell you that one way in which sports is exactly like real life is that in both instances one can count on the fact that the professed experts rarely if ever know what the hell they're talking about. With that in mind, here's one self-professed expert's opinion as to what we can reasonably expect from the Saints this season.

1. The Saints will score lots of points. Or... they will as long as Drew Brees's right arm remains attached to his shoulder. Brees likes to spread the ball around and, this year, he should have plenty of help doing so. Expect Deuce McAllister to have a big year as is often the case with a star runner in his second season back from major knee surgery. The offense could get into trouble if injury-prone starting receivers Devery Henderson and Marques Colston miss significant playing time. But then, Bush plays wideout fairly well and Lance Moore looks like a stud so there is plenty of depth there.


2. Opposing teams will score lots of points against the Saints. The Saints defense returns nearly all of its starters from last season. That's a bad thing. In 2006, the Saints' D ranked 23rd overall against the run. Its journeyman linebackers were frequently seen being pushed around by more physical opposing runners. Despite some attempts to improve the personnel in the offseason, no free agent acquisition managed to supplant any of the three painfully average starters. One bright spot could be the return of safety Roman Harper who appears to be an aggressive tackler who can make a difference in run support. But overall, this remains a questionable unit.


3. Winning professional football games is hard. The difference in talent from team to team is so fine a thing that very little can be taken for granted. Looking at the NFC, I'd say it's safe to say that the Seahawks, Rams, Panthers, Eagles, Cowboys, Cardinals, Bears, and probably the 49ers are all at least as talented as the Saints if not more so. I've also got this funny feeling about Atlanta this year. The Falcons already have a pretty respectable defense as well as a decent running game... to go with Joe Horn's mouth on offense. And I can't help but wonder if losing Vick might end up being one of those weird "addition by subtraction" scenarios. Just keep an eye on them.

Given all of this, it seems likely the Saints can play every bit as well this season as they did last year and still finish with something like only 7, 8 or 9 wins. And factoring in the fact that the kicker sucks, I'll have to err on the down side of that and say we're looking at a very exciting, but somewhat disappointing 7-9 in 2007.