The Black and Gold Lining
 

Before you catch on that this is yet another bounty related thread, I want to make mention that I want to look at the positive side of what has happened and how it will affect the team. Some of my thoughts are:

1. It will give Sean a chance to clean up some things in his personal life without it being a distraction during the season. Not to be cold hearted but I'm sure most everyone at this site at least suspected something was not exactly right between them when Coach moved his wife back to Dallas.

2. It will give Sean a chance to view his team from a perspective no other head coach has ever had...as an outsider. Maybe he'll spot some things that he can use in 2013 that he otherwise would not have seen.

3. People take sabbaticals all the time to renew and refresh during their careers. I'm sure Sean would rather not be taking it, but it gives him a year off from the daily grind of an NFL HC. There's got to be some positives in that.

4. Will Smith's season is now 75% as long as most of the DEs in the league. Sure, he's going to be missed the first four games, but afterwards he should rested and healthy.

Any other positives I've missed?

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

ScottyRo, why dont I know you? Anyway, I think your points are great.

I too, when Payton's wife moved to Dallas, thought, "Things that make you go
hmmm? I've had a middle age crisis, and I was useless. Dont know if thats
anywhere near the situation, but something's up, and needs to be worked on.

I took a sabattical from my career, and when I came back, I could do things
I never could do before. It made me hungrier.

I think of the Will Smith thing as the normal time we seem to lose a player each year to injury. I hope he does come back fresh.

Why not?

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

Extra motivation "win the whole ****ing thing to stick it to Goodell

HOME SUPERBOWL

Brees gets more experience running the offense and calling plays ala Peyton Manning

The 12th man will be even more dangerous!

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

Thanks, skymike.

You probably aren't familiar with me because I'm something of a blast from the past here. I haven't posted much since Aaron Brooks dominated 49 of every 50 threads.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

nice

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

YES, motivation against NO GOODell. I forgot that one and it's a big one.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

UGHH!!! That was a sad time in Saints history that I would just like to forget. :chug:
One more positive thing is that the coaches will grow even more and then next year Payton can help remold the organization.

Edit: He rebuilt the organization from the top down after Katrina. It might just be time for him to reevaluate the organization again.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

Hopefully we will be saying, "how do you improve from winning the superbowl?" That will be a great problem to have.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

I think you summed it up quite well.

I will add a few personal thoughts that I know some will not care for but "it is what it is".

1. Curtis Lofton. In our love affair with certain players they stay on the field way past their value period in my opinion. Vilma would have been battling a recovering knee and declining skill all season.

2. Double edged sword: Carmichael gets HMFIC time, albeit at the risk of someone stealing him next year.

3. No matter what the outcome, we WILL be a stronger team next year.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

Hahaha, Smith keeps gettin' these suspensions and he'll be suspended... um....errrr, playin' forever.

Re: The Black and Gold Lining
 

Great thread, ScottyRo, great post.

I have thought a great deal about the Payton thing.

One thing to me about this whole situation that is really weird, that nobody has really talked about much, for him personally, is that Payton basically gets to "die" for a year, and then see what happens -- see what people think about him, what they do and what they say about him when he's not around, and what happens to the team and to his friends and everything else. And then he gets to come back! It's like a Charles Dickens moment, which almost never happens to anybody in real life.

Because while he's inside this weird black hole of semi-non-existence that Goodell has put him in, Payton still gets to see the response from the fans -- which was pretty amazing -- and from the team, which has been nothing but expressions of love and admiration for him. He gets to see exactly which writers trash him and which people stick up for him. He gets to see what Carmichael calls on 3rd and goal from the 1, or if his longtime friend Joe Vitt can maybe win a ring as a head coach... And he gets to realize that yeah, there are probably some things in his personal life that need to be taken care of, cleaned up. Him going to the Hall Of Fame ceremony with his son, to see Cortez Kennedy inducted, that's no accident. That was real.

The Freeh report is going to be important, too. It will probably be a boring read. I think Benson is realizing that there are things within the corporate culture of the Saints organization that need to be changed and done better. The organization itself will be stronger. Maybe they figure out what to do with Rita until she gets her crazy **** together, chain of command, decision making, problem resolution, boring internal stuff like that.

And lastly, I look at stuff like, not the wiretapping allegations themselves but the question of HOW the allegations happened. HOW does one get these crazy unprovable anonymous wiretapping allegations made against your GM, blindsiding you at the worst possible time -- what leads up to that, what are the reasons for it? How does something that effed up and impossible happen, to a gazillion dollar corporation? And in all of these incidents, Bountygate, wiretapping, Geoff Santini, in all of these you had a situation where you had out-of-control disguntled ex-employees who were let go and yet could run around outside the organization and extract anonymous revenge. So I think there is some corporate lesson to be learned there, although we don't really know what it is yet.