TheOak

This is how it breaks down for New Orleans vs all the other teams.

New Orleans wins a close one or comes from behind to win = They squeaked by and pulled it out of their lucky azzes, when will this luck run out... Or... New Orleans almost looses yet another one.

Any other team in the NFL wins a close one or comes from behind to win = That is what Champions are made of. Good teams do that. "insert QB name here" showed why he is a top tier QB by orchestrating a come from behind win.

Sad thing, our fans do it to.

AsylumGuido

But the point is that the Bengals and the Cowboys are not poor teams. Not even close to it. They are good teams with great talent and poor records. Like every other team we have played this year they simply played to their potential when they faced us.

RailBoss

The games that hurt us most were The Cards and The Browns. But you can't expect to be perfect every game that is just the way it goes. The big win was against The Boys on Turkey Day for a lot of reasons.

Rugby Saint II

Come from behind games may be good for the team but their hell on the fans.

the-commish

I think giving up the big leads the past 2 weeks on the road had more to do with "other" factors than just getting conservative, or having the D play bad. In Big D on Thanksgiving, Miles Austin's TD reverse should have been called back due to Witten's hold on Malcolm Jenkins. Had that TD been called back, the Cowboys would not have had the momentum in the second half. In Cincinnati, the special teams coverage sucked, and the Bengals constantly had a short field. SP will see to it that that gets straightened up.

Here is an encouraging stat: the Saints have won 12 of their past 14 games on the road (one loss was the meaningless Carolina game at the end of last season; the other was the offense's total meltdown vs Arizona this season). Except for that, we are PERFECT on the road in the last two seasons.

I know playoffs are another whole ball of wax, and road playoff games are tough. But this team's play on the road has got to be encouraging to us WhoDats.

skymike

Right on. I believe the ability to overcome is the mark of a winner. Staubach, Elway, and Joe Montana werent great because their team beat everyone 44-0. How did Joe Montana get to be Joe Montana? By his 4th Quarter heriocs. (And by beating us, after we put up a 28 point lead.) When our guys play, they believe theyre going to win. When another team has a lead, and something small goes wrong for them, you know they're thinking, "oh crap, here they come again." Every team has big, fast, talented guys. Every team can win on any day. The difference is up in their head.
Uh uh, boss. This aint college. They're not grading on style points, and there's no bad teams in the NFL, only bad seasons.

We've clobbered some and pulled out miracles against others. I've been watching football for a long time, and I can tell you teams that can pull out wins from the bowels of a loss, especially on the road, are the ones that end up at the top. We've got something special again this year. GEAUX!

darstep

All I'm saying is, it sours when you leave it out too long, and we've been leaving it out.

xan

There are only a couple of really bad teams in the NFL, and we've exhausted our experience of them. All that's left are playoff caliber teams. I didn't and still don't consider Cincy, Cleveland, Seattle or Dallas bad teams. And the Rams are sneaky. We are every teams' measuring stick, so we get the extra effort straight to the end. Each team we've played except for Carolina have had big things to play for outside of the motivation of facing the reigning Super Bowl champs.

Beating anyone in this league with all the variability in weather, injuries, refs and matchups is an accomplishment. You all know I'm a worrier, and always concerned with the downside, but it's future downsides and potential for ignoring opportunities. While there is much to be dissatisfied with aspects of some close wins, we will never get a lay-down like the Pats got from the Jets Monday night.

Winning is all that matters.

Calvin: "I wish I was a Tiger."
Hobbes: "Common lament."

darstep

How you win also matters. Its nice to know and to have proven that we can make it happen at the end of a game to pull out a win, but that's not the position you want to be in week in and week out. Even a magician has to reload his hat at some point. The notion that we can get it done is good to have in the back of our heads. I worry about it coming to the front and allowing players to justify missing that block on 3rd down in the first qtr, or blowing an assignment midway through the 2nd, or not executing on every play because we can just "make-up" for it at the end. You win first in your mind, then you execute. Without the execution we are setting ourselves up for a dropped pass, a bad call, a holding penalty, a missed chip shot, pass interference or some other jaw dropping game changer late in the game - when sound fundamentals and execution takes all of that stuff off the table. I applaud the things we have done well, but week to week, we have to clean up the areas where we have not performed well AND manage to keep the good things at their high level. Its not easy, but we can't keep rolling the dice every week.

**SaintSince67**

skymike

I said "bowels." huh huh...