Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2013 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the 2013 NFL previews so far right here.


Your team: New Orleans Saints

Your 2012 record: 7-9. GOODELL!!! (shakes fist dredged in Cajun seasoning)

Your coach: Wine-swilling bounty program overlord Sean Payton, back after a year in Ginger Hammer-imposed exile. And the best part is that Saints fans believe having Payton back will solve all of the team's problems, which might be possible if Payton played both cornerback and defensive end. In a league with so many terrible defenses, the Saints had the worst defense by FAR. They gave up 15 percent more yards than the second-worst defense in the league (the Giants). And who did they hire to fix this mess?


(door flies open)

OW-OOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Finally, Wolfman Rob is workin' in a city that GETS him. Me and this town go way back, friendo. I remember coming here for my fourth bachelor party back in 1982. I went to my favorite bordello—Lucky Pierre's—and met up with this Creole gal who had REMARKABLE tits. Well, she takes me up to the Dr. John Suite and peels her lace frock off. And I swear to God, this gal had not one dick between her legs, but TWO! Looked like a cow's udder down there. Well anyway, I make a few "halftime adjustments" and we ended up having a shitkickin' good time. I won't lie: I love a woman with a man's ass. I may have been on mushrooms and acid at the time. REAL WILD SHIT.

Your quarterback: Drew Brees. Having Drew Brees as your quarterback means that every offensive possession will end in either a) a touchdown, or b) a horrific interception that Drew Brees is somehow never blamed for. When Tony Romo throws a pick, everyone shits all over him. When Drew Brees throws a pick, Saints fans are like GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO BREESUS CAN'T DO IT ALL HIMSELF GUMBO GUMBO PO' BOY ZYDECO POLICE CORRUPTION.


Your one fantasy player everyone will hate: Mark Ingram, who remains thoroughly useless. The Saints have concocted the perfect nightmare running back platoon. Darren Sproles catches all the passes. Pierre Thomas gets all the long runs. And Mark Ingram gets all the plays where he's stuffed at the goal line twice before a frustrated Brees throws an effortless touchdown to Jimmy Graham on third down. If the Saints could find a way to use sixteen backs to gain 1,200 yards over the course of a season, they would.

Why your team sucks: Do you know what the worst defense in football doesn't need? A new base alignment incorporating an elaborate, blitz-heavy scheme that is entirely reliant on good personnel and forces terrible defensive backs into one-on-one coverage against some of the league's best receivers. Julio Jones will get 1,000 yards receiving in just two games against this shitpile. The Saints defense is Roger Goodell's perfect 21st century defense: a completely defanged, helpless unit that gives up 30 points for every useful play it makes. It's an ideal television defense in that it does nothing MOST of the time, but will occasionally get a token interception just to let you know that NFL defenses haven't been eradicated completely. In this town, a quarterback has a better chance of being brought down by violent diarrhea than by a Saints defender.


Without Gregggggg Williams around to hand out under-the-table bonuses, and without Mickey Loomis' elaborate series of locker room fap cameras, the Brees Saints are like the Marino Dolphins: a team designed specifically to rack up gaudy passing stats and do absolutely nothing else useful. And, as always, the miserable bags of shit that constitute this fanbase deserve such torment. You people can't even speak English, or any fucking language for that matter. People from New Orleans just make a bunch of noises and pray that it comes out understandable. WOOOOOOOOOO HYEHHHHHHH OODAYYYYYYYYY...

WHO DAT! You shouldn't be proud that your team's slogan is something that a three-year-old in need of occupational therapy would say.


FUN FACT: No New Orleans resident has taken a shower since 1985. You people are worse than rednecks because you think having a bunch of overcrowded, sweaty jazz clubs and a signature fried shrimp hoagie makes you immune from being labeled rednecks. Not true. You are rednecks with an inexplicable superiority complex. New Orleans is the birthplace of so many awful things: goth culture, actors trying to get extra "realness" cred, Dan Aykroyd's music career, writers who co-opt the city's poorest residents for their own moral grandstanding, an economy based solely on tit beads, and natives who earn a living off of tourism but make every effort to let tourists know they don't "get" their shithole of a town and never will. GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO BOURBON STREET AIN'T THE REAL N'AWLINS GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO. I hope the Saints' Super Bowl win is eventually vacated.

Why your team doesn't suck: Turns out none of the OTHER teams in this division can play defense either, which means the Saints could easily barnstorm through the regular season before they encounter a real defense in the playoffs, become frustrated that they aren't scoring right off the bat, and then commit nine turnovers in a lopsided loss. Should be fun to watch.


The 10 worst Saints ever:

1. Aaron Brooks

2. Johnathan Sullivan. Never trust that extra H.

3. Archie Manning. Archie had a completion percentage under 56 percent and threw almost 50 more career interceptions than touchdowns. Oh, but poor Archie had no supporting cast. If Archie's name were Aaron Brooks, they'd be burning effigies of him outside the Superdome to this day.


4. Mike Ditka. The best part about Ditka's tenure in New Orleans is that it was the moment that America realized, "Hey, wait a second. This guy's a fucking idiot." And we've never looked back. Good job, 'Merica.

5/6. Billy Joe Tolliver/Billy Joe Hobert. Starting games in the same season! Unreal. Like a Manziel family reunion right there on the football field.


7. Val Kilmer

8. Gregg Williams

9. Ricky Williams. If the Saints ever draft a player named Billy Joe Williams, I'll die laughing.


10. Vaughn Dunbar. I thought Vaughn Dunbar was awesome because he rocked the dark visor with his helmet. Bonus points if your visor is mirrored. I'd want a police badge on my shoulder pads to go with it.

Emails from Saints fans:

Anonymous:

Russell Erxleben. Only the Aints would draft a punter/kicker in the FIRST ROUND and have him flame out 4 years later.


Jeff:

Ever since we stopped sucking the bandwagon has gotten insufferable. Since the Super Bowl year it doesn't matter what the outlook is like, it's always "Oh yeah, we're winning the SUPABOWL DIS YEAR!" Every. Fucking. Preseason. This year is worse. Sean Payton is back and now everyone is like "16-0, SUPABOWL, DAT DAT DAT" forgetting the fact that we forgot to field a fucking defense last year. I guess I shouldn't bitch, but I had daydreams for decades about us being good. And now that we are, I can't realistically talk about my expectations for a season without being called a closet Falcons fan or a pinko commie or a queer northerner (I'm from NOLA and have actually been called this) just because I can't see the Saints being any better than 9-7 this season because of the defense. This is all because we've picked up bandwagoners who only got their head out of LSU's ass once the Saints got good. And since the bounty scandal, Jesus, it's like anytime the Saints lose it's a personal affront to the city and "our way of life" from the NFL.


Anonymous:

Who Dat!



NO. Shut up. The chant is stupid. Several teams beat us every year, that's who say they gon' beat them Saints.


Dan:

I legitimately dread having to watch Jonathan Vilma try to operate in a 3-4. Outside LB has been a revolving door of a joke for pretty much this entire century... and now 288-pound former defensive end Will Smith is being asked to stand up. This will be like watching the Hindenburg try to land. Scott Shanle managed to start for YEARS until Steve Spagnuolo realized the guy sucked and made him a healthy scratch for most of last year. Yes, the man running the worst defense of all time (while starting eight top-50 picks) saw how awful he was when two prior DCs didn't. Our young guy with promise got hurt in mini-camp, which in any other year would have re-opened the Shanle door, so thank heavens I don't have to deal with that. Finally, the dude who does OLB shit the best is a 5'10, 205 lb. strong safety who couldn't defend a bank with a machine gun.


Anonymous:

The only thing we're more loyal to than the Saints is making awful reality TV shows.


John:

This.

John:

Roman Harper is still a Saint. How many fucking times does this shitbag have to get torched in the endzone before one of the defensive coaches finally realizes he sucks balls? In 2010, he got walked down by Sam Bradford on an interception return with a 15-yard head start. Of course everyone remembers the fact he gave up 4 TDs to the Seattle Seahawks in a playoff game that year.. so what did he do for an encore to kick off 2011? He gave up 3 first half TDs against the Packers…. Two were to Jermichael Finley… and then the Packers inexplicably stopped throwing to him and the Saints nearly came back to win the game. We all know the epic fail he and Malcolm Jenkins combined for in the playoff loss to the 49ers at the end of that season. What makes the fact Harper is still a Saint EVEN WORSE was that they could have cleared nearly $4 million in cap space by cutting his ass. But no, Mickey Loomis allowed a March deadline to pass that guaranteed Harper $2.6 million in 2013. Yes, they ended up restructuring the entire deal so Harper’s cap hit was reduced... but they could have saved more if they had just cut him loose. At one point, he was a 7.1 million dollar albatross against the cap. Now he’s scheduled to make $3.7 million this year. Fuck.


Jared:

Our fans are absolutely terrible. When the team was bad no one cared at all about the Saints. You couldn't find anyone wearing a Saints jersey, cap, or shirt. After our Super Bowl win, everyone acts like it was the greatest thing that ever happened to them in their life. Eight out of 10 people are constantly walking around in cheap ass Chinese knock off NFL jerseys, while most of those same people have those stupid, obnoxious Super Bowl champion flags on their car. We can't tackle, we can't cover, we couldn't stop the run if Betty White was running the ball. So what do we do in a year when there's dozens of viable options in free agency for defense? We don't make a move on anyone. The Saints suck and Saints fans suck worse.


John:

We have a fanbase that is a bunch of conspiracy theorists that are always arguing and debating with their crazy lunatic theories that everyone is out to get the Saints, like last year. It just never stops with the "poor us, the bounty thing was a conspiracy" Everything is a fucking conspiracy! Every single loss is some kind of disaster with a hidden hand pulling strings behind the back. The fans themselves are half of the problem when every single loss last year was somehow always to be blamed on poor officiating, the bounty situation, or Roger Goodell himself. They never can think for an instance that our team is just not as good as they once were, and we have one of the worst defenses in league history that can't tackle to save their lives.



Two years in a row, we went to the playoffs and Roman Harper played the worst games ever against the Seahawks and 49ers, and he's still on the fucking team. No matter how many times he can't tackle a receiver after a 50 yard bomb goes into their hands, or the missed tackles that lead to a 30 yard pick up, he's still somehow on the team. If you were to count how many times there is a missed tackle in a single Saints game, you would lose count before halftime. Brees can throw 40 touchdowns and for 5,000 yards in back to back seasons and it won't matter in the end cause it's never enough. Last year, they simply did not want to run the ball at all, and that is the biggest issue with the offense. Everyone is happy only when Brees is dropping back to throw 40-50 times a game. Even in games where Pierre Thomas was averaging more than 5 yards a carry, they refused to run the ball.



The Saints will probably win 10 games this upcoming season with a weaker schedule and then get blown out in the playoffs where the other team amasses 500 yards. All offense, absolutely zero defense at all.


Nick:

Who dat? It's cute when kids say it. It's really annoying when drunk, full-grown men scream it. Repeatedly. Stop it already. If it's older than Tag Team, it needs to be laid to rest.


Wsyaw:

With the window of Drew Brees' best years squeaking audibly closed in the background, the Saints have stood pat with THE WORST DEFENSIVE SIDE IN THE HISTORY OF FOREVER. Their solution to terrible play at all positions in all formations and looks is to move underachievers to positions that they can only play worse at. My God, it's like a nightmare out there where your strategy is to have Will Smith blitz from 12 yards back while Kenny Vaccaro bites on a fake and runs halfway across the field and there are zombies and vampires in the enormous seam they've opened that make 20 yards at a shambling pace with their legs falling off behind them. Long story short, they'll need at least three 45-44 wins to make the playoffs.


Brian:

Mark Ingram. The guy that essentially cost 2 first rounders and a second rounder, so he will continue to be run into the ground until he either magically becomes good or gets unceremoniously shipped out (see also: Reggie Bush). Many Saints (and Alabama) fans will tell you that Mark Ingram isn't the kind of RB that can play well with only 8-10 touches per game and he'd be much better as a 20-carry-per-game guy. That's bullshit. A guy who sucks for carries #1-10 doesn't suddenly stop sucking on carry #11. The Saints have other RBs that are actually good football players but only get a few touches per game because they don't have Ingram's pedigree. Don't believe the hype about Sean Payton coming back, either. He's the guy that drafted Ingram and shipped off Chris Ivory. Plus the defense still sucks. We just went from one bad defensive coordinator with awful players, to another terrible defensive coordinator with the same crap players, most of whom wouldn't start for any other teams.


Adam:

Nothing better than watching your team score 35 points a game only to watch the other team easily score a touchdown in the last minute to win.


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