I've been a Saints fan for 45 years.......

I’ve been around for every Saints season. The vast majority of our teams have been less than stellar and have required true fanship to continue to watch and support our beloved team.

The Saints have had worse teams and worse coaching. But the game has changed a lot in the last decade or so. What has never changed is the need to have good starting talent and decent depth, especially at key positions.

Would our Saints be a better team if we had all of our starting players healthy? Without a doubt. Are our backups such a drop off in talent that they can’t play well enough to win? Apparently so. Should the coaches be good enough to make these rag tag backups play like a real contender? I don’t know how anyone could even argue that such a thing is possible.

I’m not trying to make excuses for Dennis Allen. He has enough time at his position to make the Saints a better team than they are now. But the same can be said of Mickey Loomis. Ultimately Loomis has to gather the pieces together. If the talent is there, a good coach will make sure to bring it out for every game. But if the talent is lacking, there is no coach on the planet that can make them a consistent winner.

It’s the nature of trying to ‘win at all cost’ that eventually the cost actually keeps you from winning. Very high priced players get old & ineffective, and newer players generally only excel when other good players are working shoulder to shoulder with them.

The Saints have second & third string quality players that are having to carry the load of making the playbook run smoothly on Sunday. But they can’t. Things as fundamental as making sure tackles are not being executed effectively during the most important plays of the game. The result is more than just a loss. The game becomes a gut-kicking blowout.

The Saints cannot do anything about the key starters who are watching their struggling team from the sidelines. But after Weeks 1 & 2 this is what we’ve been reduced to. And with no end in sight of these crippling, roster-depleting injuries each week, there’s nothing else we can expect from our team but to see a lot more of the same.

Blowing it all up and starting over is never in a GMs vocabulary. His job each season is to convince the fans that his team is just one or two key players from being able to contend for a championship. But the Saints are far more than a few players (or coaches) away from being great again. I know that, YOU know that, and (if he’s being honest) MICKEY knows that.

But we are fans and this is our team. To me the off-season is long and empty. I have chosen to follow my team whether they are legitimately in the playoff hunt or not. Clearly this year we are NOT. But I can’t change this reality any more than any of you can. I must say that it’s been a long time since it’s been this bad and this hopeless. But maybe something will change when some of our injured players are back on the field after our BYE week. Then again, this train may never stop wrecking. 😢