Getting cursed out helps Saints’ ‘hangover’ By Michael Silver, Yahoo! Sports (1 Viewer)

[justdave]

The day Sean Payton got his first NFL head coaching gig, the hotshot assistant head coach/quarterbacks coach excitedly shared the big news with his boss, then-Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells. He’d just been hired by the New Orleans Saints, and there’d be a news conference to introduce him as the franchise’s 14th coach the following day.

“You’d better figure out what’s been keeping them from winning the last 38 years,” Payton remembers Parcells telling him, “or else three years from now you’ll be having another press conference.”


Payton figured it out, taking the Saints to the NFC championship game in his first season. Three years later, he delivered the first Super Bowl triumph in franchise history and set off one of the biggest parties that North America has ever known.

When I saw Payton in Foxborough, Mass., last August as the Saints conducted joint training camp workouts with the New England Patriots, a big topic of conversation was the so-called “Super Bowl hangover.” Six months removed from his team’s landmark victory in Miami, Payton faced daily questions about whether his partied-out players could recapture the intensity and focus they’d summoned in 2009.


On Monday night in the Georgia Dome, we finally got our answer. Coming off a disheartening defeat to the Baltimore Ravens that all but killed their hopes of repeating as NFC South champs, the Saints delivered a pre-playoff message to the conference-leading Atlanta Falcons and the rest of the NFL, powering their way to a 17-14 victory that put them into the postseason on a decidedly emphatic note.


For the first time since they vanquished Peyton Manning(notes) and the Indianapolis Colts on Super Sunday, the Saints (11-4) looked like the fierce, formidable team that no one will relish facing. Overcoming a pair of potentially ruinous fourth-quarter interceptions by star quarterback Drew Brees(notes), New Orleans locked down the Falcons (12-3) in impressive fashion, limiting Atlanta to one offensive touchdown.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ms-footballneversleeps122810

 

[Bourbon]

For the first time since they vanquished Peyton Manning(notes) and the Indianapolis Colts on Super Sunday, the Saints (11-4) looked like the fierce, formidable team that no one will relish facing.

I appreciate the write up but is this true? No one found us formidable when we beat the Steelers? When we beat the Vikings? When we trounced the Bucs?