This is the silver lining to the Saints three-point loss against the Chiefs

It does us no good to dance around the subject, so let’s put it out there. The New Orleans Saints did not impress in their 32-29 loss to Kansas City on Sunday.

There are a million things that didn’t happen that needed to for the Saints to be able to compete with the Chiefs. There were breakdowns in a lot of places and more than a few questionable officiating calls.

That’s the bad.

Then there is the ugly. With two weeks to go in the regular season, we have a lot of injuries to key players, including a bunch that happened in this game.

And to make it worse, the Saints play on a short week this week, having the Christmas Day game against the Minnesota Vikings. Health is going to be a major factor as the Saints close out the season.

But we must place some good in with the other stuff and there was some strong positive to take from this game.

I was fortunate to be one of the 3,000 people in the Superdome for this game. Since there are so few fans, we got much better seats than my typical “cheap seats”. To say the Superdome was desolate would be an understatement.

The dome with that few fans is simply like a large cavern or a tomb. The vast majority of the fans were seated on the Saints sideline from one end zone to the other in the lower two sections. Distancing and mask-wearing was enforced and I saw several people asked to replace their masks.

I was one of five people in my row and section, and to keep people separated, they had bands around the seats so the ones not allowed to be sold to people could not be put down to sit in.

The sounds and atmosphere are so different and it’s odd to be able to hear talk from the field. And forget crowd noise on third downs – there was simply not enough people to make even a small difference.