neugey

Bako's long post got me motivated to write for a little bit.


I had an interesting thought this week, and would to know what others who have been a Saints fan for longer might think. I latched on with Saints around 1993, so I'm not really an expert on the comparison I'm about to make.


Earlier this week on his channel, I heard T-Bob say that there is no comparison for the inept way that the Saints organization is run right now. But I think there might be one comparison ... the old Saints. The pre-Mora, pre salary cap era Saints.


Prior to the salary cap era, NFL teams had to go through long, long rebuilds in order to turn things around. The Saints were one of the worst in the league in this era. No salary cap, no free agency to help reset the roster. Had to build through the draft and usually did a crummy job of scouting and selecting. Average at best with regards to making trades. Very poor at selecting and hiring coaches. The paper bags did not appear without a good reason. Being a prime Super Bowl location and having great tourism was probably what kept the Saints afloat for so many of those bad years. But it had to be gruesome to be a fan in this era. Many years of ineptitude with no immediate hope in sight.


It's actually quite remarkable, because Mickey has pretty much engineered things perfectly to recreate this era and set us back to the pre-Mora days. Roster inflexibility is a major problem with all of the contract extensions/restructures. So many of the veteran contracts have poison pills where the dead cap penalty makes releasing or trading any of these players impossible. Even retirement (which could happen soon with Cam) cripples us. Drew's retirement brought on a dark cloud with the dead cap it yielded for 1-2 years. Hanging onto Dennis Allen has been pure stupidity. It's as if good coaches are hard to find. They aren't these days. Back in the old days they were because there was so little money in the profession and the legends like Shula and Bill Walsh held all the cards with their staffers remaining loyal and unlikely to leave. Our drafts are shoddy and possibly starting to resemble those sad drafts of the old days. And I bet in old days, the thin line between upper management and ownership parallels what we have now with the Gail/Lauscha/Loomis conondrum.



I say all this to say ... has Mickey put us in a predicament where we are strapped as tightly to futility/losing as the days of old? Is his excessive loyalty to DA (and to Carmichael before this year) a throwback to the days of old where we stayed loyal because we didn't feel there were better options? Doesn't it feel like Mickey is the old grandpa going 40mph on a 75mph freeway when he's not binging Matlock reruns and scotch? Of course there are other franchises like the Browns and Raiders who are a mess in their own right. But it seems like we're the hoarder whose prospects of a clean well-kept house is just not feasible.