The "Blueprint" For Beating The Minnesota Vikings

… it seems rather obvious. No one ever said Gregg Williams was a Cal Tech graduate.

I think that, with Sharper out and other defensive injuries, we should be able to move the ball on the Saints. Getting the running game going, and I like the idea of getting some screen passes going to neutralize the blitzing a bit.

The big question for me is “can our secondary hold up?” We need to put some of those big hits on Brees. I see a lot of 4 receiver sets for the Saints. We need big time pressure, better than we got in the NFC championship game.

Remember, even with all the turnovers last year, we still tied them in regulation, and our defense gave up only about 250 yards. With no EJ!

Be the Saints.

… that not only did we outplay them last year in the NFC championship loss, but the Saints lost at home to the Tampa Bay Bucs.

People not giving us a chance are kidding themselves. It’s not going to be an easy game, but it is hard to say which team will win when neither has played a regular season game yet.

I’m hoping the Vikings come out with energy and play like they are on a mission. I think they will. I think the Saints might be tight. We just need to go get them.

Good luck tomorrow. Last year’s NFCCG was disgusting to watch, because the team that was so clearly superior ended up losing. It was blatantly obvious to me and everyone who was watching the game with me that the Vikings were the better team. I thought that the Saints were paper tigers and would get rolled by the Colts, but Indy was not the team I thought they were. You guys deserved to win the SB last year, and it was not fun seeing NO and their simpering media gaggle slobber over the Lombardi. Please do us all a favor and kick the snot out of them.

Being allowed over 350 yards passing for Favre and 120 yards rushing for AP every week sounds pretty sweet.

No Saints fan that I talk to ever considered Greg Williams defense to be good. Opportunistic, maybe, but not by any means good. The Saints defense has been fairly useless since 2006. I’ll quote myself here: “Man, the Saints are scoring like 30 points/game. All they need is a slightly less worthless defense and we would be winning all these games.” That’s what Greg Williams brought us – a slightly less worthless defense. I mean, all they have to do it prevent the other team from scoring 30 points and even a worthless defense can do that. The defense is more or less the same only now but, unlike Gary Gibbs, G. Williams likes to bring a little heat. I see nothing wrong with that. If you’re gonna give up the same yardage anyway, you might as well try and bait the offense into making a few mistakes along the way. It’s a high risk, high reward kind of thing I guess. They still gave up the yardage by came away with nearly twice the number of turnovers as in 2008(22 vs 39). You also assume that the Saints offense will perform the same as it did in the NFCCG. Seriously…even professional athletes can have off days and that bug apparently bit us for that game. Yes, the Vikes had an unusual 5 turnovers, but the Saints only scoring 7 points from 5 TO’s is also quite unusual. Anyway, base on some of the comments I read in this thread, I guess wishing a great, injury free game for both teams would fall on deaf ears. Peace out.

that was a 7 and 8 win team in 2007 and 2008. The main difference? Turnovers. Last year they were +11.

In 2007, they were -7. In 2008, they were -4. I can think of a couple games right off the top of my head (at St Louis, Washington, the Vikes) where they got a timely special teams play or a critical turnover. If I dug deeper, it would probably be more. The Saints are good, but they were also one of the luckiest teams I can remember.

They won’t be +11 in turnover margin again this year, and the Vikes won’t turn the ball over five times.

I’ll agree with that for the most part, but it’s fairly easy to discern whether a turnover was ALL luck or at least some part defensive skill(i.e. the ball getting poked out by a helmet vs a player stripping the ball out). That being said, with more skill certainly comes more luck, yah?