NFL | Saints are on the attack

In football, and in life in general, there are numbers that strike the imagination.

The number 99, for example, is inseparable from Wayne Gretzky, just as the number 20 is associated with Fernand Gignac for his classic 20 Great Love Songs. Right now, in the world of American football, the number 4.33 is all the talk. Because 4.33 is the average number of points scored by the New Orleans Saints in each series since the start of the season.

That’s right: Every time the Saints offense takes the field, an average of 4.33 points are added to the scoreboard. That’s huge, and for reference, in the current century, the 2007 Pats hold the record for that, who averaged 3.19 points per series on 50-yard passes from Tom Brady to Randy Moss. Plus, the Saints have scored on each of their first 15 offensive drives this season, something that hasn’t been seen since 1978, according to our friends at the Elias Sports Bureau.

What does that mean, exactly? Good question, because last week the Saints’ opponent, the Cowboys, suddenly forgot to play defense, but no matter: the Saints have won their first two games by a combined score of 91-29.

The Saints had finished last season with an unremarkable 9-8 record, and that needed to change, so they made changes, which is usually a good idea when you want to change things up.

So coach Dennis Allen set about rethinking his entire attack, including hiring a new offensive coordinator, Klint Kubiak, a disciple of the cerebral Mike Shanahan, former coach of the Broncos in the golden era of John Elway.

The Saints are tough, they’re tough to follow, and, so far at least, no one has been able to stop them. But hey, you don’t win the Super Bowl in Week 3, and sometimes things fall apart after a spectacular start, like the 2015-16 Canadiens or the three girls from Las Ketchup.

The fantastic thing is that the Saints are doing all of this with Derek Carr at the helm, a 33-year-old quarterback who was foolishly discarded by the Raiders two years ago despite a nearly 5,000-yard season in 2021. It’s partly because of decisions like that that the Raiders haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1984.

Other than that, will the Carolina Panthers win a single game this season? They won two last season, they just lost their first two, and then to quote Descartes in Metaphysical meditations, page 27, Summary of the following six meditations : “What’s that?”

Already in panic mode, the Panthers have decided to make a change at quarterback. Thus, young Bryce Young will go and think about the meaning of life on the bench, while veteran Andy Dalton, 36 years old and redheaded, will go on the field to try to revive this moribund team. Obviously, we wish him good luck.

Losing is one thing, but in the case of the poor Panthers, it’s all about the manner, and in the last 10 games, the Carolina club has held a lead for… 10 seconds.

It’s impressive how bad it is.

Since time is running out, we’re going to move on to readers’ letters with Mathieu Deschênes, who chose to share with us this beautiful slice of life that involves our favorite team: “Almost 15 years ago, I went to see a Jets game (against Miami, it’s all in everything) and after the loss, the fans sang “Joe must go! Joe must go!” I asked the guy next to him what it was about; he explained to me that a group of fans in the section where we were concluded that the Jets would never win as long as Joe Namath was on this earth. A kind of curse of the poor man’s Bambino. Since then, with one of my buddies, we occasionally brew a homemade beer that we call Joe must go!, a very bitter IPA.”

Another reader asks what Kant is doing here, and it should be remembered that Kant once wrote that “amusing reading is as good for health as bodily exercise,” and doesn’t that sum up this fine column very well?

We’re all eager to see if the Saints are “for real,” as Pat Burns would say, and luckily they should have some opposition this Sunday against the Eagles, who better redeem themselves after last Monday night’s comedy. The Panthers will try to score at least one touchdown in Vegas against the Raiders, and then, at 4:25 p.m., the Bowl of Disappointments will pit the Baltimore Ravens against the Cowboys in Dallas.

The beer will need to be chilled.