Monday Night Memories: New Orleans Saints vs Seattle Seahawks - October 14, 2007

October 14, 2007

The New Orleans Saints of 2007 had something they had never had before: expectations. The storybook year of 2006, when they went a shocking 10-6, won the NFC South, and rehabilitated the public image of New Orleans, loomed large in everyone’s minds, and a sequel was expected promptly. With Drew Brees, catalyst at quarterback, ready for his second year in New Orleans, and rookie sensations Reggie Bush and Marques Colston still at their positions too, everything was in place for the Saints to become a signature team of the league, maybe even start a dynastic run.

Those expectations, despite having no physical presence, had a certain weight. In the season opener against the defending champion Indianapolis Colts, the Saints fought hard, going into the half tied at ten, but the Colts rolled to a 41-10 victory, scoring 31 unanswered and intercepting Brees twice, including a pick six. Other blowouts against non-contenders Tampa Bay and Tennessee followed, and when the Panthers hit a last second field goal to win 16-13, the New Orleans Saints, chic pick to win the Super Bowl, were 0-4. Offenses would take an early lead on New Orleans and then sit in soft zones and wait for desperation to force mistakes. Brees had thrown nine interceptions in those four games, only two shy of his season mark the year before, and had only compensated with one touchdown. Last year’s Cinderella was left barefoot and steering a pumpkin down a dark parish road.

Cold streaks like that are the stuff of coaching nightmares, and it’s possible that they are unavoidable, like heartbreak, hangovers, and traffic. But there are many coaches at all levels who think they can control for everything and keep every boogeyman out, with simple notions like isolation, clean living, and getting on the road early enough. Mike Holmgren was one such coach. Holmgren’s lone Super Bowl title as a head coach was done with Brett Favre as his quarterback. Holmgren would make savvy, conservative, gameplans, and Favre would rip them up, leaving Holmgren to pretend that had always been the plan. Holmgren resigned from Green Bay at the end of the 1998 season to take an opening with the Seattle Seahawks that promised front office control as well. In 2001, after a trade with the Packers, we got to see what Holmgren’s ideal quarterback looked like: Brett Favre’s backup, Matt Hasselbeck.

This all sounds like a series of left-handed insults to Matt Hasselbeck, who was a fine player, a multi-time Pro Bowler. But his biggest positive in Mike Holmgren’s eyes was his willingness to do whatever Mike Holmgren said. The result was that the Seahawks became consistently good and often in the playoff hunt, where they usually floundered. In overtime of a playoff game against the Packers, at the coin toss, Hasselbeck said, “We want the ball, and we’re going to score.” He probably had someone other than Packers corner Al Harris in mind when he made that boast. The Seahawks even made the Super Bowl in the 2005 season, but failed again to the Steelers in a dreary 27-17 affair. Holmgren blamed the referees for that, instead of his own team’s execution. Tight end Jerramy Stevens in particular, looked like he couldn’t catch a cold in Alaska barefoot. Holmgren’s responses to these misfortunes were to become more and more risk-averse. In 2007 training camp, a time when many coaches are obnoxious with claims that they will open up the playbook, Holmgren was adamant that Hasselbeck needed to check down more. Shaun Alexander, not far removed from an MVP season, was eager to pick up a new dimension to his game, but it wasn’t an inspiring plan. Nevertheless, the Seahawks were ready to host the winless Saints with their record at a sturdy 3-2.

Sturdiness would not be what defined this game. To stick with sturdy in a figurative meaning, a bad snap on a Seattle punt gave the Saints an easy touchdown to take an early lead without running a play. To use instead the literal Oxford definition of sturdy as “strong and not easily damaged,” something shocking happened before the next drive. The Saints called a timeout heading into a third down, and during commercial break an overhead “Cable Cam”, part of NBC’s Sunday night broadcast, got stuck on its cable. The game was delayed for almost ten minutes while the technical issue was adjusted, and as Hasselbeck and Holmgren conferred on what to do, the camera fell right next to them. Like a horror movie it rose and landed again, this time scaring the wits out of receiver Bobby Engram. An inquest by the contractor later discovered user error behind it; someone turned the motor off and never turned it back on, and gravity eventually prevailed on the camera as it does on all things. The camera was corralled and everyone was kept out of mortal danger, though announcer John Madden joked it was hanging over Boone Stutz, the long snapper who had fouled up the Seahawks punt.

It’d be easy to excuse the Seahawks for their rattled nerves the rest of the way, and they were full of the mistakes that rattled people make. Hasselbeck’s style of quarterbacking relies on establishing an easy rhythm, and nothing breaks up a rhythm like a near death experience. The defense didn’t get the right bounces, as a Saints fumble was recovered by the Saints and returned for fifteen extra yards in the course of a long scoring drive. Finally in position for a field goal, Seattle’s attempt was blocked, and the Saints ripped off another touchdown to make it 21-0. It was 28-10 at the half, and Seattle’s second half score was a courtesy, allowing the score to be a respectable sounding 28-17.

Adding insult to injury, the falling camera wasn’t the only thing television did to disrupt the Seahawks. Along the sidelines an intrepid cameraman, dreaming of his far-off days in film school perhaps, went for a cinema verité shot looking over Holmgren’s shoulder. HD was not yet the universal standard, but it was available, and if you were watching Sunday Night Football on NBC on a newer TV (and not the 14 inch I was making do with in an apartment off of Bonnie Brae), you saw Mike Holmgren’s entire playbook. Coaches are nuclear secret level sensitive with their coaches on the best of circumstances, but 2007 was also the year of Spygate, the near-hysterical investigation into the New England Patriots stealing signs and illegally taping opponent’s walkthroughs. Here was something nobody needed to steal. You just needed TiVo. Holmgren was more furious about this than the falling camera, and devoted a lot of his post-game presser to lamenting the influence television had over the game of football, influence that he had tried to stop when he was on the competition committee.

Head coaches want, more than anything else control, and I suppose we all do. But there’s no such thing as enough control. Disaster lurks on every crosswalk, in every email attachment, beneath every promising first date. Coaches can gameplan all you want, but you can’t predict the weather, you can’t account for falling cameras, and you have no way of influencing the decisions of a television director. Even the bounces of the ball, oblong for reasons that pass understanding, are beyond scheme, beyond skill, beyond prayer.