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By Nick Underhill
Sean Payton often talks about “the game.”
He watches the Super Bowl intently to see what the two remaining teams are doing and how they got to that point. Two years ago, he mentioned how the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks played defense. Last year, the Denver Broncos' pass rush stood out.
Regardless of whether the game provided a source of inspiration, the Saints spent last offseason revamping their interior rush. It helped, and the organization needs to figure out if it will retain Nick Fairley, but there is still plenty of work to be done on that side of the ball at several different spots.
What, if anything, the Saints take from this game remains to be seen. This Super Bowl, viewed as a single entity, at least from a distant perspective, was short on lessons other than the importance of playing for 60 minutes and making sound play calls. But those are hardly the kind of things that will start a trend — they have long been obvious.
If you cut the game off at halftime, the one thing that stood out more than anything was the Atlanta Falcons' team speed. They are hardly the only organization to build its roster this way, and the league has changed since Bill Parcells used to crack that teams who took undersized players “could fit their whole draft class in a Volkswagen,” but the thing that stood out about Atlanta — as it did all season — was how quickly its defense swarms to the ball...
Full Story - The Advocate