New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - Article Saints: Forget the Titans

METAIRIE – The New Orleans Saints’ exhibition finale at the Tennessee Titans on Thursday means everything to those players fighting for their NFL lives, but to the rest of us it means nothing, nada, zilch.

The NFL exhibition season is always too long, and the games during the final week are always exceptionally uninteresting. But if you’re a Saints fan, it’s been exponentially worse this summer.

Ever since the NFL announced in the spring that the Saints would open the season against Minnesota in a rematch of New Orleans’ dramatic and historic 31-28 overtime victory in the NFC Championship, everyone has been looking past mini-camp and OTAs and training camp and exhibition games to the Sept. 9 opener.

If you’re a Saints fan, you can now taste it. The defending Super Bowl champions started practicing five weeks ago. Enough already. They’ve already played three exhibitions. Enough already. Brett Favre has … enough already.

Come on. Numerous Saints starters won’t dress out for this last exhibition, and anyone with even the slightest injury won’t play; some won’t even make the trip to Nashville.

Next Thursday they’re going to unveil a Saints Super Bowl Champions banner inside the Superdome for crying out loud. So forgive me if I’m having a hard time getting worked up over whether some guy named Junior Galette makes the team or whether Patrick Ramsey or Chase Daniel becomes Drew Brees’ understudy or even if Darren Sharper begins the season on the PUP list.

Regardless of who’s on the roster and who’s not, the New Orleans Saints are about to begin defense of their Super Bowl championship. Let’s get it on.

The NFL schedule-makers knew what they were doing when they plucked this rematch ahead of the seven other options on the Saints home schedule to be the annual Kickoff Game in the reigning Super Bowl champions’ home stadium.

Hey, even the players have been looking ahead to this game. They’ve been “trash-tweeting” back and forth for months.

NBC is televising the opener and it will gush about Favre, but this game is about the Saints. With apologies to Favre, his ankle, and his ego, the Saints are the ones dropping the banner before the game, they’re the team to beat, and let’s not forget, they’re the team that won the last meeting to get to the Super Bowl. Oh, yeah, and they won the Super Bowl too.

Good luck to all those players trying to secure a spot on the Saints regular-season roster – the exhibition finale is like the Super Bowl to them – but whoever occupies those final spots is incidental to this long-anticipated coronation/season opener.

The last time the Saints played a meaningful game in the Superdome they beat the Vikings to win their first NFC title. Now they’re fixing to play host to the Vikings again in a fitting bridge from last season to this.

Last season was unlike any other Saints season, and so too will this one. For the first time, every other NFL city’s team is trying to catch up to New Orleans’.

Are you ready for some meaningful football?