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Odds stacked against New Orleans Saints in their bid to repeat as Super Bowl champs

The only thing more difficult than winning a Super Bowl is defending one.

Only eight of the 44 Super Bowl champions have repeated the next season. The 2003 and '04 New England Patriots are the only team to have done it in the past 11 years.

In fact, the New Orleans Saints are more likely to miss the playoffs altogether than make it to Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium.
Only 11 Super Bowl champs were able to reach the Super Bowl the next season. Yet 13 of them failed to make the playoffs at all. That includes four of the past eight (the Steelers twice, Buccaneers and Patriots).
If that weren't enough, consider this: No NFC team has played in consecutive Super Bowls since the Packers went in 1997 and 1998.
So the Saints won't just have to beat the Falcons, Bucs and Panthers this season. They'll have to beat history.

That is the way the NFL wants it.

The league is designed to create parity. From the moment a team wins a Super Bowl title, it's swimming upstream.
The draft works against you.

The schedule is stacked in favor of your opponents.
And this year, even free agency is designed to make life more difficult for the Saints.
After the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, Coach Bill Belichick sought "repeat" advice from former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson at his home in Florida. The challenge, Johnson said, was two-fold. First, you must manage higher expectation, not just from outside the building, but inside it. Role players, Johnson said, would suddenly want to be stars. Everyone would want new contracts.

Belichick later referred to this as "the virus of higher personal expectations."
The Saints have already encountered that condition in free agency. They've managed to keep the core of their team intact, but some players and their agents have groused privately about their deals. Some even have stayed away from the offseason conditioning program.
The other danger, Johnson said, is to avoid trying to do the same things in the same way as before with your players.

Toward the latter, Saints Coach Sean Payton appears to be taking the right approach. He understands what worked last season won't necessarily fly in 2010.
"I'm not ever trying to pick up from where we left off. We start all the way back at zero, " Payton said earlier this spring. "The players, I want to make sure that feeling doesn't exist.

"I believe that once you get to the top of the mountain, you've got to come back down and begin the journey to go back up. You have to start with this offseason and start with the minicamps and then get through training camp, and you have to, hopefully, climb back up the same way you did the year before, rather than you just stay up there trying to defend it."

Payton understands the challenge ahead. He knows the same colleagues congratulating him this offseason are also breaking down every snap of his team's game tape trying to solve its high-powered offense. As General Manager Mickey Loomis noted, the Saints will have "a big fat target" on their backs this season. Last season, they were picked third in the NFC South Division by most preseason publications. This year, they'll be a unanimous pick to win it and one of the favorites to reach the Super Bowl.

The other issue, of course, is complacency, or as the NBA's Pat Riley calls it, the Success Disease. It takes root, he said, when you're feeling good about who you are and what you've achieved.

It's been well documented how much the Saints have celebrated this offseason. In fact, team officials have encouraged it. There have been countless TV spots, autograph sessions and paid public appearances.
Will all this hero worship go to the Saints' heads? We won't know a definitive answer until the season kicks off.

So far, it appears the Saints are trying to avoid the trap by setting the bar high for themselves. Drew Brees and Reggie Bush dropped the "dynasty" word in recent interviews. From another team, such smack might come across as cocky. But for these Saints, it seems healthy. They've responded well to these mind games in the past.

But considering the threat of all these viruses and diseases, the Saints are going to need a strong immune system as well as a healthy ego this season.