WhoDat!656

Was it because of coaching, players or just not good enough?

|Mitch|

Offense was always lacking with the defenses we had

stickman

Coaching. Based purely on watching the team, I would say our offense didn't make adjustments during the game.

edit: You could also add because we were in the same division as the Joe Montana led 49ers.

Rugby Saint II

We were loaded with great prospects that never worked out. Also, Benson ran the Saints with a used car mentality.

dam1953

I say two reasons. Brees (an elite QB) and Payton (an offensive genius) .... and I'm not sure that I can say which is most important. If you look at the 2012 season we missed the playoffs without Payton but Brees still put up crazy numbers. Even though we were weak and getting old on D much of the 2012 fiasco can be put on Spag.

What we have not seen, and I hope not to for some time, is Payton w/out Brees behind center.

Euphoria

We were definitely limited by our QB's.

Don't get me wrong we had serviceable QB's but none that could get the job done.

I think back to the 49 and Saints games and we'd hold them in check the only real team giving them a run for the money was us. When you hold a team to a 6-3 game and only lose it by their QB just making a couple of more plays than our QB.

Jack Vegas

QB, plain and simple. Hebert was fine for the regular season but choked like a dog in playoff games. We always had 2-3 good RB's, several good WR's and a nice offensive line. We had a great defense and the best kicker in the NFL. And Mora was a darn good coach. Hebert just wasn't a big-game player and it hurt us continually in the postseason.

I also think there was a lot of pressure to be the first Saints team to get that far and that had an effect. But what was it, 1992, we were up big on the Eagles, everything was going great, and Hebert comes out the 2nd half and throws 3 picks.

OC Carl Smith was also bad, but 3 yards and a cloud of dust was kind of the norm those days. We played old-school smashmouth football like most teams did at the time.

People will also say we were just unlucky to be in the same division as the 49ers, but that doesn't explain total choke jobs against the Bears and Vikings in games where we just got throttled. IMO, it just all comes back to the fact that we were not good enough at the QB position. Other teams had Marino, Kelly, Moon, Cunningham, Elway, etc. We had Bobby Hebert. Big drop-off there.

Papa Voodoo

We had no real offense threat except for Morten. Even if all we had was a star RB like AP we would have gone deep in the playoffs. Seattle can throw, but they showed strong D and running is still a proven way to win.

WhoDat!656

IMO, it was a combination of players and coaching.

Hebert was the weak link on the offense, and Mora was just too defensive-minded.

As good a coach as Mora was, if he had allowed the offense off the leash a little bit the Saints would have been a lot better.

I remember a quote that a player, possibly on the whiners, said about their mentality during that era, 'If we got up 21 points on a team, we played like we were 21 points behind.'

YBP, Years Before Payton, the Saints played not to lose, and didn't play to win.

"A Veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America" for an amount of "up to and including my life."

SmashMouth

Choke job? Are you comparing Hebert to Romo? I wonder if Hebert feels guilty for being such a choker?