It’s hate week. The Saints are a terrible team. This should be easy, right?
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the Panthers then you know the last thing they call easy is a divisional match up. Keep in mind that match up is against an all-time great quarterback in Drew Brees and all of a sudden you should be at least a little nervous.
We know the Saints have a joke of a defense and an offensive line that makes ours look good. Put all of that aside and pay attention to one thing if the score is still close in the second half: Drew Brees, when he is under pressure.
The wizened signal caller doesn’t have the same ability to shake, bake, and otherwise take defenders out to lunch the way our own Cam Newton does, but he has shown an uncanny ability to avoid sacks in his many, many games against Carolina. Sometimes this comes from subtle movements within the pocket and other times this comes from straight-up magical attempts to throw the ball away made in the same moments that some of our defenders are escorting him, horizontally, to the ground. These escapes have, unbelievably, inspired about as many fans to refer to him as “The Bayou-dini” as they have drawn intentional grounding flags.
Carolina has started 2017 with a defense that is earning no end of praise in the press. New Orleans has just lost several of the starting members of an offensive line that was already earning Brees no end of sympathy. Doing the math, we can assume that Drew will face more pressure than Jake Delhomme parked between a Popeye’s and a Bojangles. The key to this game is how many of those pressures can we convert into sacks of the Great Bayou-dini.
Sacks really do kill drives. Sacks in the second half of a close game will make all the difference in the world in giving Cam and Co. the breathing room they need to work out the kinks that we have seen over the last two weeks.