Transition from Hunters to Hunted Isn’t Always Easy: Saints May Find That Out Soon
Everybody knows how difficult it is to win one championship. It’s draining, exhausting, it requires sacrifice and it takes the talent to go with it. Combine that and you have a chance at a championship. Now if you want to repeat as champions, you may have to multiply that all by two and that’s about how hard it is to win back-to-back championships.
That rule goes for any sport, but it may go for the NFL just a little bit more. It takes a special team to win a Super Bowl and it takes a very special team to win the Super Bowl two years in a row. Not many teams have found it easy in NFL history. However, the New Orleans Saints have shown they are a special team with their championship win last year.
Gone was the futility of the franchise. All the years of torture, all the years of being a joke and finally came the glory the franchise and the whole state of Louisiana was waiting for.
Now the Saints are on top of the league and they are no longer a team off anyone’s radar. They are no longer quietly lurking around the NFL. Everyone is noticing them. They’re the new belle of the ball and everyone wants a piece of them. They’re that new coveted piece of meat lurking around the NFL forest and everyone is attempting to hunt them down, wanting to be the team that takes them down.
The question is if the Saints will be able to deal with that new found pressure that comes with winning a championship. The franchise has been on its rise to the top ever since both head coach Sean Payton and QB Drew Brees joined the team five years ago and began building the team to what it eventually accomplished in February.
The Saints are now what every team in the league will be measured by. Teams will measure how good they are by comparing themselves to the Saints.
Teams have also thoroughly studied the Saints style and plays inside and out. That puts the team in a tough spot because if the team does all the same things as last year, they risk becoming predictable, and if they do change things, it could be a tough adjustment for the players.
Something that will totally be out of the Saints control is injuries. The team was fortunate last year to have not sustained any major injuries and were able to roll through the season to a 13-0 start and an eventual championship, but injuries can happen at any time. Look at the Steelers and Troy Polamalu last year, or The Giants and Osi Umenyiora. You can go on and on. An injury to say Drew Brees (knock on wood), or any key player on this team, can be tough to overcome.
So far this offseason, coach Payton has chosen to deal with the challenge by developing amnesia. He’s not even thinking about last season and sees the 2010 season as any other season. It’s a new beginning with new challenges ahead. The party’s over in New Orleans and everyone must now get back to football. The whole league is preparing for them.
There are some reasons why the Saints can repeat. They have kept all their pieces in place from last year. No assistant coaches left for coaching jobs somewhere else and all their key players are still back from last year. Sean Payton is also taking the right approach to this season.
The bottom line is that some things can happen out of the Saints’ control. You can’t guarantee that this team will repeat and you can’t count them out of it either.
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