Saints: Pulling positives from the negatives in Week 15
By Tony Twillie
And the not so good
Now the not so good. There has been a noise from this corner of the internet for a little while now. My colleague Roy Anderson spoke about it recently. It’s that little thing that the fan folks didn’t want to admit and the people who follow closely don’t like to speak of. But this Saints offense has some deficiencies.
One only need to look once again this year at the lack of production at the TE position and the continuing lack of production with every wide receiver not named Michael Thomas. There have been a lot of drops in the last three weeks. Our offensive line’s injury woes are beginning to catch up with them. Teams are double teaming Michael Thomas and daring Drew Brees to go elsewhere. Keith Kirkwood has had a few catches, but overall the receiving corps has been missing in action.
Whether they aren’t getting separation or running poor routes, they can’t seem to catch Brees’ eye. And then when he delivers, too often they are not completing the catch. And when that happens too much, Brees forces poor passes like the one he tried on the two-point conversion, which was easily intercepted and returned for two points the other way against the Panthers.
Or Sean Payton calls a gimmick play on 3rd and 4 at the Carolina 5-yard line which could have cost us the game. Suffice it to say, we are a bit stagnant on offense. And that stagnation is causing us to play in ways we wouldn’t normally play on offense. We’re showing too much high-risk play.
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Many people wondered why we were looking to bring in Dez Bryant or Brandon Marshall. Our offense today is why. Particularly near the end of the season when you play a lot of divisional games, the schedule gets tough. We play these teams twice a year. They know us well. It doesn’t matter that Carolina had lost five consecutive games coming into Monday’s game. This was a divisional game and we were getting their best shot. We are the team to beat in the NFL right now and Carolina being in the playoff hunt also helped to make this game a bit juicier.