Crusader

Musings, observations and the occasional insight from a Week 8 that morphed from dreary to ridiculous over the course of about an hour late Sunday afternoon.....

• Among the myriad thoughts that flooded to mind in the moments after I watched that avalanche of points and yards and wildly entertaining offensive football Sunday afternoon in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome:

— Holy smoke, the Saints are alive. Very much alive. Left for dead after their dismal and inexplicable 0–3 start, the Saints have won four of five and three in a row to claw their way to .500 for the first time this season, at 4–4. What a turning point New Orleans’s improbable 52–49 win over the visiting Giants might provide in this roller-coaster 2015 season.

And don’t look now, but the Saints’ schedule is about to take a turn for the manageable, with a visit from 1–6 Tennessee just ahead, followed by a trip to Washington (3–4), a bye week and a game at Houston (3–5). Take care of business in those, and New Orleans could be 7–4 and on a six-game winning streak as it heads into its Week 13 home dome showdown with NFC South-leading Carolina (currently 6–0). If the Falcons keep faltering, and they’ve lost two of three after a 5–0 start, the Saints might run them down in another few weeks. All told, New Orleans has just two games remaining against teams that currently have winning records: The home game against the Panthers and a Week 17 trip to Atlanta.

— Now that’s the way to tie a big-time NFL passing record, Drew Brees, throwing for a whopping seven touchdowns in a single game when your team needed every last one of them to win the best shootout we’ve seen in years and years. This wasn’t Peyton Manning’s seven-TD showing in Denver’s 49–27 season-opening blowout of visiting Baltimore in 2013. Instead, this was vintage Brees, with a career-best 511 yards passing and just one deflected interception, with the Giants and Saints combining for 101 points, tying for the third most in an NFL game. Brees now owns a slice of a record that has real meaning given the context in which it was achieved.

— Wow. Imagine being Eli Manning and throwing a career-high six touchdowns with 350 yards passing, and losing. No two quarterbacks have ever combined for 13 touchdown passes in a single game, and Manning has to swallow that his contribution to that record still wasn’t enough to get the win. Manning went 30 of 41 through the air with no picks, but Brees was better at 40 of 50 and his seven scores. For both offenses, it felt as if it was a game of flag football on a Saturday morning at the park.

— Welcome to New Orleans, Kai Forbath. The Saints’ newly-signed kicker may never have to buy another beer in the Big Easy after booting that clutch 50-yard field goal as time expired, delivering a game for the ages before the raucous Superdome faithful. After several swings and misses on the kicking front of late, maybe the Saints have finally found their guy. Thirteen touchdowns and no field goals were scored in the game until the final play, when Forbath did his thing.

— The Giants’ Odell Beckham Jr. and Manning were both enjoying a spectacular homecoming to New Orleans, where they grew up and starred in high school, and then it all ended so badly. Beckham caught half of Manning’s six touchdowns and was in rare end-zone celebration form after each one of them. He finished with eight grabs for 130 yards, with touchdowns of two, one and 50 yards.

— I’m guessing Steve Spagnuolo wouldn’t care if he ever sees the inside of the Superdome again. Spagnuolo is on his second tour of duty as the Giants’ defensive coordinator, but between those stints, he served one miserable season in the same role for the Saints. That season, 2012, New Orleans gave up an NFL-record 7,042 yards, earning him a pink slip. The Saints on Sunday churned out a mind-boggling 614 yards of net offense.

— It’s always a late-game punt return that really hurts, isn’t it, Tom Coughlin? At least you didn’t kick it to DeSean Jackson this time.

— Who said the Saints can’t win at home any more? After enduring a puzzling six-game home losing streak in the house it once routinely dominated in, Sean Payton’s club is back to its winning ways under the big top. The conquest of the Giants was New Orleans’s third victory in a row at home, and in reality, the season-turning moment might have come at home in Week 6 on a Thursday night. That's when Saints reserve linebacker Michael Mauti blocked a Falcons punt and recovered it for a touchdown, keying the win over Atlanta and waking up the echoes of Steve Gleason’s blocked punt against the Falcons on that memorable Monday night the Saints returned to the Superdome in September 2006. The Thursday night win started the three-game roll New Orleans is now on.

Games like Saints–Giants on Sunday are why we watch the NFL every week: to see something we’ve never seen before. To see three-hour-plus melodramas unfold. To watch a team rewrite the script of its season, pushing the boundaries of what seems possible or plausible all the while.

http://www.si.com/nfl/2015/11/01/wee...iants-injuries

W.T. Sherman is my favorite General. After all he did order Atlanta to be burned to the ground.

burningmetal

Nice article, but I have to point something out that keeps bothering the crap out of me. IT WAS NOT A PICK SIX! I've seen a couple people commenting, either on here or in an article (like this one) calling it an interception return.

Then I heard a guy on national radio mention the play, calling it a pick six. Seriously, check the stat sheet before writing or talking about something. It was pretty obvious to me that it was a fumble, and they announced it shortly after.