This off-season, there was way too much chest beating, swaggering and celebrating by both the team and the fans. It's time for everyone to take a deep breath and find a comfortable place between cockiness and despair.
Yeah I'm not gonna complain about the celebrating. The freaking Saints won the Super Bowl. If you can't celebrate that, you can't celebrate anything. In fact I might go crack open another bottle of champagne tonight just because I'm thinking about it right now. At the same time, I see what he means about the cockiness. Cockiness is what leads to obnoxious fan behavior (which we've seen our fair share of at the dome already this year) and that way leads to madness.
Fact is, the Saints aren't playing any worse now than they have during any other year in the Payton era... which if you throw out last season is at or around .500. And HEY that ain't too too bad anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fine thing for football fans to discuss in detail the specific things their team is failing at. But the reason I think this is a fine thing is I know criticism is part of football, meaning it's at least half of the FUN of being a fan in the first place. In fact, I think the more the team struggles, the more fun this can be. The best years are the ones when the team is good but not blowing people away every week which, frankly, I think is boring and makes the fans obnoxious.
This season has the potential to be a fun ride for fans if they just let the damn story develop. So far this drama is already thicker and richer than at this point last season where, if I remember correctly, I was too hungover to even make it to the Giants game. Anyway, whoever heard of a heroic epic wherein the heroes don't face any adversity? For chrissakes, we're barely into Act II here. You, in the front row, sit the fuck down and quite your yapping before I call the damn usher.
This morning I was standing in the coffee line behind an Uptown Lady who noticed the T-P I was holding. The coffee shop I frequent in the morning is kind of an Uptown Lady headquarters. Peggy Wilson is regularly holding court in one corner of the room when I walk in, for example. Anyway the front page of my paper says, "No Reason To Panic". The Lady's face became suddenly very ugly when she saw this, "Well I'm panicking. They're just disgraceful." I tried to cheer her up as best as I could.
"Well it's a long season, and anyway we still get to keep that trophy from last year, right?"
This wasn't good enough.
"Well I don't want to go back to being the Aints"
And that was it. No smile. No humor. Just win every game or it's right back to Aintsville for this Lady. And there was palpable but restrained malice in the way she said it too. It was as though the servants hadn't set the dining room table with the proper centerpiece before an important party. This woman, and a lot of Saints fans lately, aren't paying attention to this team with a rooting interest so much as a snotty concern that it might cause them to look bad. I think maybe we owe the defending champions and ourselves better than that.
Don't be an Uptown Lady. Give the 2010 Saints a chance, please.
More on this week's game later.
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