SmashMouth

Sean Payton is going to hate this column.

The New Orleans Saints head coach is doing everything he can to curb the burgeoning enthusiasm surrounding his surging football team.

But no matter how much he poor mouths his team off the field, the Saints are countering his efforts with their dominant play on it.



Everyone can see it. The Saints are rolling.

They won their fourth consecutive game here on Sunday and they did so in subtly authoritative fashion.

They spotted the Packers an early lead with some shoddy tackling and a pair of uncharacteristic interceptions by Drew Brees and still were good enough to rally and win going away.

Their 26-17 victory was their four straight by nine or more points. They haven't lost in more than a month and now find themselves in first place in the NFC South Division.

Considering their shaky 0-2 start to the season, even Payton is struggling to find valid complaints about the way things are going. But give him this: He's trying. With each successive victory, he strides to the post-game podium and does his best Debbie Downer impersonation.

"We're still fighting," Payton said, dismissing a question about his team's four-game winning streak. "We're coming to work. We're preparing. ... We're still learning.

"It's not time to come up with any summaries (of how good we are) yet. We still have a lot of work ahead of us and very easily could have lost a game like this with some of the mistakes we made."


The Saints' sound overall play is hard even for a stickler like Payton to deny. Throughout the four-game winning streak, he has been relegated to picking nits on his team's execution.

On Sunday, he was reduced to harping on a missed blocking assignment on an extra point that led to a blocked kick in the third quarter. Otherwise, there wasn't much to complain about once the Saints overcame Brees' early turnovers and began to execute.

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