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At the crossroads

There's talk of a major reboot like the one that blessed the 2006 Black and Gold, but the coming season remains unpredictable.

By Bradley Warshauer

• Photo by Derick Hingle

Nothing about the hype that suffocated the New Orleans Saints this time last year is more retrospectively cringeworthy than something a friend said to me after the team's third preseason game this year: "Hey, remember when you wanted to start interviewing fans for a retrospective of the 2014 championship season before it started?"

  I was wrong about that team, just like almost everyone else. The Saints responded to our collective judgment error by changing directions with a series of trades and cuts and signings that made the offseason far more exciting than the season it followed. The moves were daring, maybe desperate, and have made 2015 as uncertain a season as any in a long time.

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  Drew Brees told ESPN in July that the Saints "almost have to kind of rewind, start back over, like in '06." That was neither the quarterback's first nor last comparison of the current team to that inspiring unit from almost a decade ago that returned to a struggling New Orleans after spending a year on the road post-Hurricane Katrina and improved from a 3-13 record in 2005 to 10-6 in the 2006 regular season and a spot in the NFC Championship game (losing 39-14 to the Chicago Bears).

  Head coach Sean Payton joined the refrain, but that sort of rhetoric is just football talk for unpredictability. This year the fans don't know what to expect. Neither, it seems, does the team.

  The Saints are at a crossroads. Which way will they go?

Left turn intooblivion

All those people who said Drew Brees was losing arm strength turn out to be right. Brees gets worse in 2015, and the Saints can't justify retaining him because of his mammoth salary cap number. And the defense ... well, what defense? The Saints bottom out, win three or four games and the golden age of New Orleans professional football ends.

At the crossroads | News | Gambit - New Orleans News and Entertainment

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"We may have lost the game, but you'll be hurting tomorrow." Doug Atkins