The late post from last week OR The early post from this week

It was only last week when we promised to start getting these Saints game re-caps posted before everyone had already moved on to the next game. And yet here we are typing up something we're sure to finish sometime on Saturday or Sunday of the week after the game we're trying to write about. Since we went to the Les Miles school of time management, we'd be happy to blame our lateness on some vague sideline communications issue but luckily we've got a more convenient excuse this week. Let's just call this a Holliday-related delay and be done with it.

Anyway, so the Saints pretty much kicked the crap out of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last week, and just between us, we can't stand the Bucs so this was pretty sweet. For as lopsided as this turned out to be, it seemed pretty tight through the first half when...

Hey, what's this?



Oh that's just a crappy picture I took with my phone last Sunday. Sorry. Didn't mean to leave it lying around like that. I'll just...

What's the picture of? It looks like food.

Yeah. I made this wild pig roast during the game on Sunday. It turned out pretty well. But I don't think anyone cares about that right now.

Looks pretty good. What is that, bacon? Where did you get a wild pig roast?


Alright alright. So Menckles has this friend of a co-worker who goes out and shoots things from time to time. I know, it's kind of weird. I wouldn't do it. As far as I'm concerned, meat is supposed to come from Rouses in a 5 for 19.99 sale every Saturday. At the same time, I'm not one to turn down free food from anyone or a chance to try something I haven't done before. Plus I've read recently that these animals are becoming a serious nuisance and could stand to have their numbers thinned. So yeah we've got a few wild pig roasts in the freezer right now. I was going to try and do each one in a different way but this came out so well that I think I'm just going to try and repeat the method until it's all gone. This isn't complicated but I might as well explain it while we're not doing anything. Here's what happened.

1. Make sure you're not too hungover on Sunday morning to get up a few hours before kickoff. Place your 3-4 pound roast into whatever adequately sized vessel you have available. Cover with cold salt water and leave to brine for at least an hour and a half. This should help to take some of the gameyness out of the wild meat.



2. While that's happening, chop one large onion, one half clove of garlic, two or three carrots, and a few stalks of celery. Set aside for a moment. Go out and get your Sunday T-P, make some coffee, whatever. I think it was about this point in the process when I learned that Jermon Bushrod had finally been benched. The Saints would start Zach Streif at left tackle against the Bucs but ended up rotating them in and out during the day. After the game, Coach Soupy said he, "just wanted to get both of them some work" Me, I think Bushrod is garbage and the Saints are looking for answers there. I haven't seen any announcement about which tackle will start tonight.



3. The next thing you need to understand about wild pig is that it's bound to be a bit less fatty than its domesticated cousin. In order to compensate for this, we begin by frying bacon; just enough to render some fat at the bottom of your pot. Next, take your roast out of the brine, cover it with black pepper and give it a quick searing. Put it aside and then start cooking your vegetables.



4. Time to add the roast to the pot.
   
   
   
   If you look closely there, you'll notice that we've added, more bacon, red potatoes, more black pepper (A lot. I think the pepper really made this recipe for me), thyme, rosemary, and a whole bottle of a cheap California Pinot Noir. There was much discussion beforehand about the pros and cons of cooking with wine in a cast iron pot. But the opinions were inconsistent enough for me to just say, fuck it.



5. Oven at 350. If you get this in there by kickoff, you should have dinner ready by the time the game is done.

Saints vs Bucs

Very belated so we'll keep the reporting to these five items:

• The Saints have had the good fortune to face a number of inexperienced quarterbacks this season. The latest was Josh Freeman who they intercepted 3 times. The important thing here is that Freeman kind of looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid to us. Here's the best game photo of him we could steal from the T-P.
  
  
  It's that chubby little face. You kind of want to pinch his cheeks a little.



• I notice that we're getting to that silly part of a successful Saints season where the paper forces the fashion writer to come up with some football themed bullshit. This sort of thing,
  
  

  As a power statement, black outranks blue. It's the de facto color associated with intelligence and achievement. A black judge's robe commands respect, as does the mortarboard at graduation.
  
  Unlike red, its cohort in aggression, black is less brash, more confident, signalling "authority and prestige," said Kate Smith, a Virginia-based color strategist and creator of SensationalColor.com.

  
  
  I don't see anything mentioned in the article specifically related to black pants however. But I would point out that the Saints wore gold on Sunday with spectacular results. Something tells me we'll see the leotards tonight, though.



• This week's media complaint ESPN's Gregg Easterbrook's column for last week was titled "Passsing = Winning in the NFL"

  The relationship between quarterback effectiveness and victory underscores the pre-eminence of the pass in the NFL. None of the top four rushing teams in the NFL this season (Tennessee, N.Y. Jets, Carolina and Miami) has a winning record. By contrast, 11 of the top 12 passing teams have winning records. Right now there are 14 NFL teams with winning records, and only three of those clubs are in the lower half of the league in terms of passing yards.

  Maybe. But I think if he were paying better attention to the Saints over these past few seasons the one thing that would jump out at him immediately is the relationship between winning and effectiveness in the running game. Last season, Drew Brees very nearly set an NFL record for passing yards in a single season. In 2008, Brees attempted 635 passes and Lance Moore attempted one for a total of 636 pass attempts. The 2008 Saints as a team made 399 rushing attempts. They won 8 games. This year, the Saints have rushed 322 times compared to 320 and haven't lost once. Football games are won at the line of scrimmage. It's taken Soupy four years to learn this but at least he's been willing to learn.
  
  
  Pick up a Gambit this week for a pretty interesting article about Mike Bell and his "furious" running style. Bell is a sleeper MVP candidate for the 2009 offense.



• Speaking of MVP candidates: America is starting to take notice.

  New Orleans Saints rookie punter Thomas Morstead was chosen the NFC's Special Teams Player of the Week for his performance in the Saints' 38-7 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
  
  Against the Buccaneers, Morstead punted four times for a 48.8-yard gross average with a 46.0-yard net average. He had one punt downed at the Tampa Bay 1-yard line and another at its 5.
  
  He also handled kickoff duties and recorded three touchbacks in becoming the first Saints punter to be honored since Mitch Berger in 2004.

  I'm serious about this MVP business. Morstead has more punts downed inside the 20 this season than Darren Sharper has interceptions returned for touchdowns (which is a lot)



• Bucs fans I'm a Saints season ticket holder and I hang out in the Quarter before and after most home games and I can promise you that of all the visiting football fans I've met over the years, the Tampa people are consistently the most obnoxious, the most trashy, the most likely to have been cut out of a Girls Gone Wild video than any other visitors by far. Seriously. Which is why I had to laugh a bit when I noticed Tampa-based blogger and radio host Sinfonian complaining about the alleged classlessness of the Saints fans chanting "Who Dat" in Raymond James Stadium during the fourth quarter.
  
  Tweeted Sinfonian:

  I hope Saints fans remember how much they were dicks in Tampa when they get beat in 1st rd of playoffs against a GOOD team.

  
  
  And also:

  For biggest asshole fans in NFL, I had 1. Steelers, 2. Eagles, 3. Giants. Saints are shooting up the list today, though.

  Seriously, fuck that guy. I can't wait until the Tampa Frat-Parrothead Nation shows up in the Dome in a few weeks for round 2 of this business. We're not done with them yet.

Going undefeated is actually kind of gay: I'm about to run out to catch my streetcar to the Dome as I type this. But before I go, I just want to say let's not be too disappointed when the Patriots whip the Saints tonight. It occurs to me lately that the two teams in the NFL with the best records, (New Orleans and Indianapolis) are actually something like the fourth and fifth best teams at best. If you're looking for a team you can point to as a potential Super Bowl champion, they've got to have a certain amount of toughness. The best football teams are the ones who know how to play with a chip on their shoulder like a battered and bloodied boxer who refuses to go down. I think Minnesota, New England, and Cincinnati fit that bill a bit. Meanwhile the Colts and Saints evoke a spoiled little Uptown school kid whose mother can't stop talking about how well they're doing in their exclusive foreign language charter school. Sooner or later someone bigger and meaner is gonna jack them up for their lunch money. If not tonight, then certainly in the playoffs.

Anyway the point is none of this matters if you want to enjoy yourself. Pro football is a comic exercise wherein large men wearing silly helmets run into each other as they chase an irregularly shaped ball around. And we get to get drunk and sing and act like idiots the whole time. I'm on my way to do that now. Back with more hopefully by Wednesday.