NEW ORLEANS – Twenty years ago, the Week 3 matchup between the New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons was the beginning of the glory days of football in New Orleans. Families and friends reunited as a city that didn’t know it at the time, were witness to the infancy of what would become the greatest era of the Saints’ franchise.
Two decades later, the present day fans, hoping to commemorate that elation were instead witnesses to an abysmal display on both sides of the ball, and a team that is clearly far away from establishing a new golden era for its devoted fanbase.
Slow starts, penalties, self-inflicted wounds, no run game, no run defense and another porous performance by a highly-invested in offensive line, the Saints are little more than they proved to be last year: an average team that sometimes gets it right and often can’t get out of its own way after Monday’s 45-24 loss to Atlanta.
The team has the right things in place in some areas. They’ve got a promising quarterback in Tyler Shough, an explosive wide receiver in Chris Olave and promising defenders in edge rusher Chase Young, safety Jonas Sanker and cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry. There are more to list, but these players will undoubtedly be a part of the team’s core moving forward.
Outside of that group of core players, there are a litany of doubts that leave this team scrambling to assure everyone that it’s okay over microphones at podiums rather than through the performance on the field.
The Saints, like every team in the NFL, have the capacity to get better. But after a promising start, it’s easy to see why frustration mounted so much for a home audience desperate for excitement. Instead the remaining jerseys in the Superdome with a little over nine minutes left in Monday night’s debacle were that of Atlanta’s black and red rather than New Orleans’ black and gold.
On a night that the Saints (1-3) were expected to help celebrate one of its most important franchise moments, their return to the Superdome, the team instead sputtered to a standstill in front of a mostly empty home stadium.
Credit goes to the Saints’ offense, which did everything it could late to turn an embarrassing performance into something respectable with a late score in the fourth quarter. But ultimately, the team’s loss will be remembered not for its homage to brighter days, but instead for its shockingly lackadaisical extinguishing of the potential for the season.
Perhaps it’s unfair to call into question a team’s potential just four games into the season. But a performance like that on Monday Night Football, when it mattered most to the city the Saints represent, certainly won’t be buying them much grace moving forward.
