The Saints are terrible. Since Thanksgiving they rank 27th in yards gained per play, 20th in points scored, 20th in yards per rush, and 18th in passer rating.1 The Bills, Giants, Vikings, and Broncos have had more productive offenses over the last month; the Jets, Cardinals, and Jaguars aren’t a whole lot worse.

Don’t overlook what’s happened. For 16 long quarters the Saints have been unable to pass, have barely been able to rush, and can’t score touchdowns unless someone holds their hand and leads them to the goal line. Sometimes, they can’t even do it then.

The only other four game stretch during which a Sean Payton offense has done this badly came in 2007, when the Saints opened 0-4 and scored 13 points per game. The last month is not some little deviation from the norm. It’s not a mere lull. This Saints offense found the bottom of the Payton-era basement, crashed through it to the inner mantle of the Earth, and started digging for its core. Things are so bad that Thomas Morstead, who only punted 21 times between weeks one and 11, has punted 14 times between weeks 12 and 15. Also, he almost died.

To find a full season during which the Saints have produced about the 4.8 yards per play they have managed since Thanksgiving, go back to 2005. To find a full season during which they produced about 4.8 yards per play without the influence of the Federal Flood, go back to 1999 and Mike Ditka. The coordinator was Danny Abramowicz, the quarterbacks were both Billy Joes, and the record was 3-13.

Drew Brees, bloodied.

Holy shit are these Saints good. Since Thanksgiving, they’ve strung together a run of defense unlike anything since the Dome Patrol. In that time, they lead the NFL with 21 sacks, six more than second-place Minnesota, or the same as the difference between Minnesota and 17th-place Philadelphia. They’re third in takeaways, second in points allowed. They won a game in which the offense scored just 12 points.

Go back in time to better appreciate what these Saints have accomplished over the past month. Nothing matters more for a defense than points allowed, right? Since Thanksgiving, the Saints have allowed 13 per game. The next-best number by a Saints defense in the Payton era was 19, in 2013, so let’s go back some more. Maybe to 2000, the year of 66 sacks, when the team song was “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and the Saints won a playoff game for the first time. No: 19 then, too.

The last time a New Orleans Saints defense allowed about 13 points per game over a full season? It was 1992. That comment about the Dome Patrol? That wasn’t an exaggeration. This defense hasn’t just been good lately. It’s been great, maybe best-defense-in-football great. And that matters, because come playoff time it’s not always the best team of the season that storms through to the Super Bowl and takes home the Lombardi. Often, it’s the team with the hot defense. (Ask the Patriots.)

Right now, that team is the Saints.

Cam Jordan, supertroll.

In 2018, the Saints have enraged me twice. The first time was when they seemed to be pissing away their season back in week two against Cleveland; they rebounded, of course, and they won the game and kept winning. The second time was this past Monday during the Carolina game. With every three and out, every penalty, every dropped pass, every Drew Brees panic-throw into coverage, I got angrier. By the time the game was over, I felt more as if I had just watched a loss than I did the last time the Saints actually lost.

This feeling was stupid, but I still kind of feel it. Why?

Maybe it’s the sense that the Saints have flipped into the Upside Down. Over the course of a few weeks during the 2018 holiday season, they’ve matter-of-factly morphed into a negative of themselves. Where there’s always been lots of points, there have been few. Where there’s always been Drew Brees making his case for MVP only to have it stolen from him, now there’s Drew Brees giving an MVP away so that it doesn’t have to be stolen. The Saints have trashed their own identity. What are we supposed to do with that?

We should enjoy it. The identity of the 2018 Saints? It’s, you know, winning. On their journey to the top seed in the NFC and best record in the NFL, they’ve won games in pretty much every way a football team might have to win a game. Take something away and they win with something else. They evolve, like an amoeba in the St. Bernard Parish water system, into whatever shape they need to take.

Maybe it’s worry that this defense, which has become the first great one Sean Payton has had, will be let down by the side of the ball we have always been able to depend on. “If we lose in the playoffs,” I told B&G co-conspirator Ryan after the Panthers game, “we better lose 38-35, or it’ll break me.” Wouldn’t it break you? That sort of situational irony — a dominant Saints defense allowing 10 points in a Superdome playoff game only for a weakling Saints offense to stumble its way to 9 — would be a cruel damn fate.

Yeah, that’s part of it. Of course it is. If the Saints, in the playoffs, put on the field the same offense they’ve deployed over the past month, then they might lose in a particularly bad way, and it will suck. But also they might not lose. After all, they’re 3-1 during the period of concern, and have moved up, not down, in the standings over the last two weeks. And, sitting here on on a rainblasted Thursday night in Mid-City, I can’t pretend to think the Saints’ offense will keep sucking. Not in the playoffs, not this coming Sunday, not in the Dome. Though they have personnel issues — weaknesses at receiver, injuries along the offensive line — they’ve overcome such issues before. They may not rediscover their 50 point form, but they don’t need to. Sean Payton will figure this thing out, and Drew Brees is not done yet.

“Yet.” That’s it.

Drew Brees is not done yet.

As my baby grows from newborn to kid, I’ve started to wonder what the Saints will be like for him. 2 I’m too young to have seen Archie Manning play, and for me Tom Dempsey’s 63 yard field goal may as well have happened in the year 700 as the year 1970. I used to read Saints books. I watched old highlights. I talk about the bad old days with my dad. What will it be like to talk about the great old days of Payton and Brees with a person who only knows about them as figures of local history?

It’s a rite of passage, isn’t it — pondering your place, and the place of the things that comprise the formative years of your identity, in the life of the person your child is becoming? A while ago, my siblings found a bunch of old home videos, and my brother rigged up my dad’s ancient camera to the TV, and we watched the videos and I was overwhelmed by the sense that I was seeing through clouds to another world, maybe the one just beneath me, upside down, the one that made me. There I am, tiny me, 18 months old, in the front yard. I don’t remember and so can it be said that I experienced it? But in the video my family is with me and today they are with me and they remember and so they experienced it; they are reliving, but I am discovering.

What’s it going to be like, sitting in the 600 section of the Superdome in 2028 with my ten year-old? Will it be like me, doing the same, in 1995, when the three primary entertainments were nachos with lots of jalapeños, paper airplanes, and my dad’s football gallows humor? Sports are a form of storytelling. What stories will these Saints tell?

Should I start rehearsing my tale about the time Drew Brees threw an interception but Robert Meachem pulled the ball away from the defender and ran it back for a touchdown? What about the one where Deuce McAllister carried the whole defense into the endzone? How should I describe the arc of a Brees bomb to Devery Henderson, or how fun it was that our two favorite players from 2011 were a 6 foot 7 giant and a 5 foot 5 sprite? Maybe, if we’re lucky, Alvin Kamara will still be around when my kid is old enough to remember him, but how will I synthesize the older, presumably slower, less exciting player my kid sees with the human-vaulting carnival of a player he is now? Who will our quarterback be? You think this guy is good, kid, you shoulda seen Drew Brees.

Over the past month, what we’ve seen from the 2018 Saints isn’t necessarily a road trip-induced slowdown, though it is that too; it’s not just a sign of impending playoff doom, or a foreshadowing of terrible irony, though it could be those things also; more than anything, the past month of Saints football has been a vision of a future that’s nearer than my emotions have equipped me to comprehend.

Next year, the year after, Drew Brees will be done. This era of Saints storytelling — which brought me through college into adulthood, and existed with me at a dive bar in New York in 2009 where the bartender gave me free shots, and in 2011 got me through a long transitional year in Jackson (during which Ryan and I created this blog), and turned my New Yorker wife into a Who Dat, and gave us Steve Gleason and created the No White Flags onesie the baby wears on gameday — will be over. It’ll pass into another world. To experience it, my kid will have to look into the Upside Down.

Mortality, then — not to get too fucking dramatic — is why I was so mad about a win that brought my New Orleans Saints to 12-2 and put them on the edge of a trip through the Dome to Atlanta. For a while I guess I really did think Drew Brees might play until he’s 45 (and if 45 why not 48? Why not forever?). But even if it turns out just a sidenote to a glory run, the past month revealed how unlikely that is. And I’m not ready to let go. Not yet.

We get old, our lives change, we move on. That’s how this all works. The story always becomes someone else’s; ours turns into the context for theirs. Tonight, it’s December 20, 2018, and the Saints are about to force the rest of the NFC to pay homage to them here in New Orleans. No matter how that turns out, this season will become part of the story about the great old days.

Yeah, Dad, my kid might say. You’ve told me. Drew Brees was awesome.

Now let’s watch the game.



