Saints Report # 7 - October 28, 2012

The Saints journeyed to Denver to provide the NBC Sunday Night Football crowd with one of those classic 35-34 shootouts between 2 great quarterbacks.  Unfortunately the Saints left 3 touchdowns at the airport and the anticipated shootout became a 34 -14 trouncing. 

If Denver is an example of a balanced football team, the Saints have become the most unbalanced team in history.  First there is no balance between the offense and defense.  Denver showed us what an NFL defense is supposed to look like.  Stars like Champ Bailey, Elvis Dumerville and Von Miller and a mix of young and old talent.  The Saints have no one comparable. 

To make things worse the Saints have no balance between the run and the pass and it has gotten ridiculous.  If there’s a silver lining to this season maybe it’s that Sean Payton is watching and realizing that you still have to run the ball in the NFL.  I read an article this week that suggested that the Saints upgrade the running back position in the offseason.  How ridiculous.  They have four, possibly five perfectly good running backs.  If anything, the biggest irony is having the caliber of running backs we have, and still being unable to run the ball.  Don’t you wonder what would happen if Pierre Thomas, Darren Sproles, Chris Ivory, or Mark Ingram got 20 carries in a game?  Wait – we have an answer.  Reggie Bush.  Look what he’s doing in Miami with double the workload Payton would allow him to have.  He had over 1000 yards rushing last year, and 1400 total from scrimmage.  He has 493 yards rushing this year. The whole Saints team has 508.  He’s learned to run between the tackles.  Guess what – Pierre Thomas already knows how. Give him the ball 20 times a game.  Or Ingram, who looks worse than Bush did at first.  Or, maybe Ivory, who hasn’t been active all year.  Why can’t these talented backs run the ball?  Because we don’t hand it to them, and the blocking is terrible, because it's obviously an afterthought at practice time. 

Here’s the thing – if you asked the coaching staff if they would rather gain 5 yards with a pass or a run, I’d bet they’d say pass.  And that is the wrong answer.  I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Drew Brees, but he can’t carry this imbalanced mess on his back. If we ran the ball twice as much (like 50% of the time) I can assure you our defense would be better.  They’d be off the field a little. The injuries in the receiving corps are a good example of one of the things that goes wrong when you throw on every down.  It’s time to put some heat on some running backs and maybe keep the defense off the field a little.  The math is simple.  To make the playoffs, we can’t lose again.  To not lose again, we need balance.  The kind of balance we showed only once in the Payton era.  Seems like it was the year we won a Super Bowl.