The wheels have come off the 2014 New Orleans Saints.
In a tight race with the Atlanta Falcons for “first place” in the sorry NFC South, on Sunday afternoon the Saints rolled over at home to the woeful Carolina Panthers.
It was a sullen, almost sordid affair for a Saints game. A nasty on-field fight spilled through the end zone wall. A fan threw a beer onto the field. The crowd booed an entreaty by the PA announcer to “Please remember our Fan Code of Conduct." By the start of the fourth quarter there were — maybe — a couple thousand people left in the stands.
“Obviously it was embarrassing how we played, how we coached. You pick an area, you pick a phase, it was awful,” Saints head coach Sean Payton said in his postgame press conference. “We can’t kid ourselves. That was as poor as it gets. That was bad football.”
New Orleans was in trouble right from the start. Carolina won the coin toss, elected to receive, and went right down the field and scored a touchdown. Keenan Lewis jumped a hair early, allowing Kelvin Benjamin to snag a 9-yard Cam Newton dart snug in the front corner of the end zone. There was 11:42 to play in the first quarter.
7-0. No problem, right? The Panthers kicked off for a touchback and New Orleans took over at their 20. Mark Ingram ran for a yard to kick off the drive.
And then it all started falling apart.
On the next play Mark Ingram pulled in a 4-yard pass from Drew Brees and immediately fumbled the ball, thanks to a smart poke from behind by Carolina cornerback Josh Norman. Carolina recovered at the Saints 25 yard line.
The New Orleans secondary managed to hold Carolina to a field goal, a 37-yarder by Graham Gano, the second of the seven kicks (two field goals and five extra points) he’d make on Sunday.
10-0.
Another kickoff. Another touchback. And on the very next play, just his third offensive play, Drew Brees threw turnover number two.
A deep pass to Joe Morgan was picked off by Carolina cornerback Bené Benwikere at the Carolina 40, and returned 21 yards. The play was called back and Benwikere ruled down at the spot of the interception, but it only took another three minutes and change for Carolina to make their way back down the field. The drive culminated a 2-yard Cam Newton dash and dive, breaking the plane with the tip of the ball for the go-ahead score.
Newton’s signature “Superman” celebration really didn’t sit well with Saints linebacker Curtis Lofton, who gave the Carolina QB a little shove or two.
It sparked a massive scrum that spilled out through the back end zone wall. Lofton and Carolina’s Brandon Williams were assessed offsetting personal fouls, and Williams was ejected from the game. But the touchdown stood.
And the Saints would never get close.
New Orleans finally got on the scoreboard at the 13:19 mark of the second quarter, and scored a garbage-time touchdown, but it wasn’t nearly enough to stop an unexpected Carolina juggernaut that scored 41 points.
The Panthers put 271 yards on the ground on the Saints, and Cam Newton threw for 226 yards more.
“We really just did not find our rhythm there in the first half,” said quarterback Drew Brees, perhaps forgetting the equally-terrible second half. “Give them credit, but we certainly did not execute.”
Everything that could go wrong for the Saints did. Plenty of dropped balls. Formation and offsides penalties. Shayne Graham missed a 42-yard field goal (only his second miss of the year, but the surly hometown crowd let him know how they felt about it). Even the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Dome siren broke. Adding insult to injury, someone fixed it.
The sole New Orleans highlight? Jalen Saunders, the rookie punt-returner playing in just his third game as a Saint, had 68 return yards on three attempts.
Most prognosticators believe the Green Bay Packers will beat the Atlanta Falcons on Monday, so the race to the top of the bottom of the division continues. As of this writing on Sunday afternoon the Saints are a half-game behind Atlanta.
New Orleans will travel to Chicago to play the Bears next Monday. The game starts at 7:30 p.m.
Game Notes:
- Drew Brees completed 29 of 49 passes for 235 yards and a touchdown pass. Brees now has 55,064 career passing yards, only the fourth quarterback to ever crack that plateau.
- The Saints have now scored a touchdown in 142 consecutive regular season games, the third-longest streak in NFL history… But as Sunday’s game shows, those records can be pretty suspect.
- Marques Colston hauled in five receptions for 72 yards, and now has 9,043 career receiving yards. He’s the 57th player in NFL history to crack the 9,000-yard mark.