Saints have bigger problems than officiating going forward

Imagine that you go to the mall with $500, but you promised your wife you’d only spend $50.

Imagine that the first time you take out your wallet, someone steals a $100 bill right out from under you.

You try and catch him, but he runs out the door, into his car and is gone.

So you have $400 left.

Imagine that after getting over the incident, you go to Foot Locker, Lids and GameStop (all three of my favorites) and spend every, single last penny that you have left — all $400.

So you leave the mall, get in the car and head home. Once there, your wife asks what happened to your money and why you have none left.

Do you blame it all on the robber? Or do you accept responsibility for doing so much shopping and admit that it’s a complicated, multi-faceted problem?

Likely, most reasonable people reading this just said that it’s a complicated problem and that the broken promise isn’t all the robber’s fault and that the person holding the $500 has a lot of blame, too.

OK, so now let’s talk some football.

I love to use real-life examples to relate to sports because when we think in sports terms, we (myself included) sometimes become a little punch-drunk to the facts.

All night last night, I saw posts cussing NFL officials and stating that the NFC officials have a vendetta or agenda against the New Orleans Saints.

Whether that is or isn’t true is irrelevant to the bigger picture that fans need to be paying attention to.

This team — no matter what the referees do or say — has some pretty big problems to fix going forward.

The NFL officials in this instance are the robbers. They plucked 6 points (or $100 from our above story) right out from New Orleans’ nose. There is absolutely no doubt Cam Jordan’s strip-sack should have been a scoop and score touchdown.

Anyone who denies that just simply isn’t watching the game.

But the Saints, like the man in our story up above, have greater issues right now to fix than what was taken from them.

Focusing solely on that skews the bigger picture and the real solution.

Yesterday, the Saints were just plain bad, and what’s troubling is that they were bad at times in all phases.

Teddy Bridgewater is the big target. It’s easy to blame him for all of the team’s problems.

But that’s low-hanging fruit.

Yeah, Bridgewater stunk (compared to Drew Brees’ standards). But I also saw a struggling run game, a couple drops by the receivers and some missed assignments by the offensive line.

I saw a defense that struggled to rush the passer and a secondary that can’t cover receivers without getting burned (or committing a penalty).

And a saw a coach pouting on the sidelines throughout the game — unable to get over the fact that 6 points were taken off the board.

For the Saints to excel without Brees, every, single member of the active roster will have to step up and do a little more to help the team win.

No one will replace Brees. You can’t replace Brees. He’s the best player in the history of the franchise.

But just because he’s out the next month doesn’t mean that 2019 is over for the Black and Gold.

There are winnable games coming up on the schedule and the NFC South is a wreck. If (big if) Brees is out just 6 weeks, there’s plenty of time for him to navigate a 3-5 team to a 9-7 record and a possible playoff berth.

But for that to happen, the team must block out the noise and get better.

Focusing on the $100 the NFL stole from you is not productive use of time.

You can’t control that and never will be able to control that.

But the $400 in other expenditures? That can be fixed and we need to see those improvements sooner, rather than later.