What did Kenny “The Snake” Stabler look like at 38 years young?
While true, back then a lot of Saints players were with him doing the same thing. It's just how the team rolled in those days.
Actually Bill, considering how we had some on-and-off the field chemistry problems, a lack of discipline and more then a few players in the mid-late 70's/early 80's who developed alcohol and drug addictions like Chuck Muncie (who developed a cocaine addiction in college and it metastasized or got worse here by 1980), FB Mike Schleren (?), Don Reese (another player who had disciplinary issues in college as well as drug problems and became worse in Miami and later on here after IIRC, he was arrested for a drug bust in Miami and Shula released him, viewing him correctly, as a potential team nuisance; he later wrote an infamous SI expose about how prevalent drug issues were in the NFL and American sports in general in 1982), then you have Derland Moore, a huge, bulking enormous DT from Oklahoma who was known to roam the Quarter bars like Pat O'Brien's, bars owned by celebrities like Pete Fountain and Al Hirt (a minority Saints owner) during the year and occasionally stay at Pat O'Brien's after game-days until 2-3 in the morning, that wasnt always the best environment in the world for people who couldn't handle it.
Add to the long list of players like George Rogers who developed substance abuse issues in the early 80's and it became obvious we had players who liked to have a little too much fun until it became counterproductive and finally, toxic.
Stabler, interestingly enough, marketed his own soft drink while in Houston called "Venom" that according to Snake "tasted like it". He liked Bum Phillips as a person and got along with most of his teammates in Houston and in New Orleans, but he regularly criticized Bum's 1960's archaic run-based, conservative offense that worked because he had this battering ram for a RB in Earl Campbell but by the early 80's, NFL offenses were becoming more complex, nuanced, complicated and Blum's methodology seemed stuck somewhere in the mid-60's. He could draft and coach great players but he couldn't devise an effective, more thorough, creative game-plans that maximized their skill sets.