At 4-8, my New Orleans Saints didn’t look like they had a shot at the playoffs. I don’t think they had won a game in December since Clinton was President and every week they found new ways to leave receivers open for long gains. Also, they couldn’t stop the run. Also, Aaron Brooks appears to be as dumb as a bag of hammers.
And then the Saints beat the Cowboys. The article talked about how the loss hampered the Cowboys’ playoff hopes but didn’t even mention that the Saints were still alive as well.
The next week they beat Tampa Bay and the writer noticed that the Saints were really still alive. I wrote to a friend and said that, barring some crazy, inconceivable three-way tiebreaker possibilities, the Saints controlled their own destiny.
In the penultimate week, the Saints played their best game of the year against a resting Falcons squad and won their third game in a row. In the meantime, the Vikings had lost three of their last four and were proving that I might not know what the word inconceivable means.
The last week was for all of the marbles. A rematch with the Carolina Panthers - who killed them a month ago AND knocked them out of the playoffs in the last game of 2002 - would almost certainly determine the final wildcard team. The New Orleans Saints WON!!! They played even better than they did against the Falcons the week before. Carolina never really had a chance.
And then the Vikings choked against the Redskins. And the Jets choked against the Rams. So the Rams, Vikings and Saints all finished at 8-8. With the best NFC record of the bunch, the Rams moved on. Because they beat the Saints in week six, the Vikings advanced. So the Saints, despite playing the best football in the NFC in December, once again finished out of the playoffs.
To rub salt in the wound, the Vikings and Rams both won this week, proving that the NFC is hopelessly weak. This was a year when a team as erratic as the Saints might have made it to their first Super Bowl. That, I now know, is inconceivable.
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Nice timing
