New Orleans Saints Defense: What a Difference a Year Makes

"Saints coach Sean Payton didn't offer any drastic solutions for improving his team Monday after missing out on the playoffs for the second straight year with a disappointing 8-8 record."

—Mike Triplett, The Times-Picayune, 12-30-08

It was December 2008, and the damned media was on your case about Gary Gibbs and Deuce.

Always looking for a scapegoat, the no-good bastards.

The Super Bowl may have been a million miles away that day.

What a difference a year makes.

It ticked you off that they were trying to make your old friend and trusted confidante Gary Gibbs the scapegoat for all this crap. The skinny, nerdy jerks look like they haven't played one down of football in their lives, and they're trying to make you squirm over your defensive coordinator.

But you didn't offer Gibbs a vote of confidence, either. As much as it pained you to admit it to yourself, you knew your defense needed a change of leadership—and you couldn't allow a friendship to stand in the way of what was best for the team.

You listen to sports talk radio in this city—some of the worst sports talk radio you've ever heard in your travels across the country. You heard what the idiots were saying. They were blaming Gary for the last-place finish in the NFC South.

When they asked you specifically about Gibbs at the season's final press conference—whether you intended to keep Gibbs—you chafed at the nerve of those weasels and said tersely that you weren't going to answer that question right now.

"It's unfair. It's unfair to Gary. It's unfair to point out specific players and coaches," you told them.

"Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to address these jerks every week?" you must have thought to yourself.

You didn't throw Gibbs under the bus. You took ownership of the defensive philosophy. You said it was the same defense that you and Gibbs installed when arriving in New Orleans in 2006 from the Dallas Cowboys staff.

Didn't they know that you had to play without Porter, Mckenzie, and Grant? Didn't they know Will Smith played with a sports hernia all year?

And these idiots don't even go into the office half the time. Type their stories up on a computer from home. What kind of a job is that?

"It would be easy to say, with where we finished offensively, we're going to point to defense. Some of that might be true," you told them. "But there are some things that we have to be better at offensively. So this just doesn't just shift to one side of the ball or the other, [even though] it's easy to do that. It's still looking closely at how we can improve our overall team."

You told the media sharks that this is an important part of the year because this is where a mistake made can set you back, or the right decision can set you forward.

But nevertheless, they smelled blood in the water.

You knew the defensive woes weren't entirely Gibbs' fault. A lot of it was a lack of defensive backs who lacked the ability to make a play on the ball when in position to do so. Nevertheless, your gut told you a change was in order.

You sensed the players' ambivalence toward Gibbs.

Quarterback-killer Bobby McCray told the Times-Picayune, "We had a good scheme this year. I would rather see if we could just give them some new looks, just mix it up a little bit, just do some different things at times. Other than that, Gary Gibbs did a good job calling the plays."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. One year later, McCray would send Kurt Warner into retirement with a violent but perfectly legal hit.

Within a week, Gibbs was gone. Brash-talking Gregg Williams was the new defensive coordinator, and he would install a ball-hawking mentality—learned from his days hanging around Buddy Ryan. That change of mind-set/mentality that would play a major factor in the Saints' meteoric rise one year later.

But on that chilly ole' New Orleans day in December 2008, the Super Bowl looked a million miles away.

Alas, as those French Quarter preachers say every Saturday night on Bourbon Street, "The meek shall inherit the Earth. The last shall be first."

What a difference a year makes, heh?