Sarcastiholic

2010 NFL Season - Division Round - Cardinals at Saints

No team has ever won a Super Bowl after losing their last three game of the regular season. But that’s just what the New Orleans Saints are going to try and do.

First off, they will have to beat the Arizona Cardinals who just piled on 51 points against one of the league’s best defenses last weekend. In order to do so, the Saints are going to have get back to their average of 31 points per game instead of the meager 15 points per game that they averaged over their final three games. The Saints offense needs to get rolling early and Darren Sharper has to come up with some big plays.

No, strike that…

Darren Sharper is going to have to come up with some HUGE plays to limit what the Cardinals are capable of doing if they are firing the ball like they did last week. Kurt Warner put together the highest rated passing performance in the modern era of the NFL against the second ranked defense.

There is no reason to think that he will not be able to repeat that performance this weekend against a soft New Orleans’ defense which ranked 25th overall and 26th against the pass. The Saints’ pass rush performed slightly better in the overall standings with a rank of 13th in the NFL but they will have to get consistent pressure on Warner in order to give their secondary any chance at limiting the Cardinals’ offensive production.

On the opposite side of the ball, the Arizona Cardinals have the 6th ranked pass rush and will definitely be doing everything they can to pressure Drew Brees into making bad decisions. The plus side for the Saints is the simple fact that Brees does not tend to make a lot of bad decisions having finished the regular season with only 11 interceptions, a 70.6 completion percentage, and a 109.6 percent passer rating.

Unbelievable. I have no idea why this guy didn’t get more votes for MVP.

Peyton Manning finished with 16 interceptions, a 68.8 completion percentage, and a 99.9 percent passer rating.

Unbelievable. I won’t even get into the Chris Henry argument…

Anyway, despite the overall unbelievable play of the New Orleans’ offense during most of the season, I can’t get past the fact that they were totally flat for the last month of the season. I just do not see how they can pull off a win against this Cardinal team, right now.

Cardinals win.

Tags: Arizona Cardinals, Darren Shaper, Drew Brees, Drew Brees is the MVP, New Orleans Saints, NFC, NFL

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 8:08 AM and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.