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New Orleans turns the corner Divine times on the bayou hint at an even brighter future
The Rams had been stopped on their first series against the two-touchdown underdog Saints on Sunday. Trent Green fumbled a snap, then threw two straight incompletes, one of them on a drop. "Nervous," I wrote in my notes. "Why?" Why indeed? Green and the Rams were at home against a team with a young quarterback making his first start and a pair of running backs that consisted of a tiny 5-foot-8, 180-pound rookie named Chad Morton and a guy the Rams had cut themselves, Jerald Moore. OK, the Saints could play defense, but how were they going to outscore St. Louis and its cast of thousands? New Orleans got a little something going on the ground, then bogged down and punted. Az Hakim made a sizeable return past midfield. Then Green threw an eight-yard hook to Isaac Bruce that turned into a 33-yard gain when Fred Weary, the Saints' right corner, caught his cleats in the turf and went down. Torn knee ligaments. Out for the year. "A killer injury," New Orleans linebackers coach John Bunting said over the phone Monday. "He'd been having a Pro Bowl-type of year for us." The Rams scored in three plays, and in a way I was sorry I had chosen this game as one of the three early ones that I would chart and tape because it was going to be a blowout. St. Louis has four productive wideouts, any of whom can go all the way on one play. If you want to match up with them, you'd better have four good DBs, one of whom would have to devote part of his day to combination coverage on Marshall Faulk, because no linebacker could handle him alone for an entire game. Without Weary, the Saints were shorthanded. Alex Molden, normally the nickel back, took over at Weary's corner spot. Molden, who was benched during the Mike Ditka regime and sat and fumed for a year or two, has had a rebirth of sorts under Jim Haslett and his crew. The other starter was ex-Cowboy Kevin Mathis, lost in the shuffle when Dallas was having the miseries in its secondary, but again functional in New Orleans. Ex-Steelers safetyman Chris Oldham started the game as the nickel linebacker. He was an active nickel back in Pittsburgh, but never a starter and hardly a star. And the fourth DB for the Saints became Michael Hawthorne, the sixth-round draft choice who had seen little action this year. Is this the crew you want to send out against the St. Louis point machine? "Well, they sure did the job, didn't they?" Haslett said over the phone. "Sometimes, if you know what you're looking for, you can put together a pretty good group, if you have a system in mind and the pieces fit." "The sum of all the parts," Bunting said. "This is a defense that's driving itself. They play fast. They fly around. And the whole thing is keyed by a relentless defensive line that can generate a rush all by itself." Well, we all know what happened Sunday. The Saints won it, 31-24. Their defensive line stripped the ball from Green twice on drives that started on the New Orleans 10-yard line or deeper and forced a field goal on a third. The Rams were held to their lowest yardage total of the year. Offensively, the Saints controlled the clock with 44 running plays behind the best offensive line in the business, and Brooks held up just fine. New Orleans won the battle up front on both sides of the ball. I read somewhere that the Rams receivers dropped nine balls. On my chart, I had them for five, but I grade them differently. Faulk, the Rams' most dangerous weapon, was trapped in a combination coverage that limited him to 43 yards, rushing and passing. At times it seemed that the Saints defense would set a deliberate trap for him, inviting him into an open area, then closing it on the go. Oldham, who started the game as the third DB playing linebacker, had Faulk most of the way, sometimes passing him off to a DB downfield. It was speed against speed. Linebacker Keith Mitchell said after the game that he was Faulk's personal spy, but I didn't notice that. "Nonsense," Bunting said. "I had to laugh when I read that. We didn't use any spy technique. Well, OK, Keith did do it one time, but it was on his own. Normally he's the edge rusher when we go three-man line, but one time he dropped back into coverage. I said, 'What is he doing out there? I didn't call that.' He just decided to cover Faulk on that play. We had a conversation about it after the series." There was an interesting shot of Haslett on the sideline with 2:48 left. The Rams had just been stopped short on fourth down and had challenged the ruling on the field. There was that agonizing moment while the ref went under the hood, then the announcement that the ruling stood as called. The Fox cameras showed Haslett, no doubt expecting some wild outburst of jubilation, but he was all business, sending his offense out with instructions. "Pretty stupid challenge, wasn't it?" he said. "Oh sure, I'm emotional, I just don't show it. What good does it do?" I'm still trying to get a handle on Haslett as a coach. I remember him well as a player, a roughneck linebacker who'd take that extra shot, then wink and nudge you in the ribs when you asked him about it in the locker room. "Oh, he still has that wink," Bunting says. "And he'll take that shot, too. Anybody who screws up will know about it, right there on the practice field." The Bill Parcells style. Let 'em know how you feel, and if they don't like it, tough. Then there's the spare-the-feelings coach, much beloved by the player who gets called into the office and privately informed of the error of his ways, thus sparing him any possible humiliation. "Jimmy's definitely not of that latter type," Bunting said. "But he'll check the locker room just to see how guys are doing. The thing we all try to do, though, is to be consistent. Then there's the matter of trust. It's big with Jim and it's big with me, with all of us, actually." There's an interesting nucleus of ex-NFL defensive players on the Saints' coaching staff. They were all the same type: blue-collar, hard-working, none of them a No. 1 draft choice. Bunting, a linebacker and an 11-year Eagles' veteran, played for Marion Campbell's relentless, undersized and overachieving defensive line in Atlanta. Former Philly head coach Dick Vermeil always said Campbell, the Swamp Fox, was the best in the business. Haslett learned his football in Buffalo from Tom Catlin, Chuck Knox's old security blanket. Knox took Catlin with him everywhere he went -- from Buffalo to the L.A. Rams to Seattle. Sam Clancy, the defensive line coach, lasted 10 seasons in the NFL as a hard-working, 6-7 pass rusher, achieving his greatest success in Cleveland, where Tom Bettis, then Dave Adolph, both respected figures, ran the defense. And Winston Moss, a general defensive assistant, was a 10-year linebacker, four of them in the take-no-prisoners Raiders system. "It's kind of nice, having a bunch of ex-players around you on the staff," Haslett says. "We speak the same language. We went through the same things." Perhaps the greatest of Haslett's accomplishments this year has been to get so many players performing at absolutely peak efficiency. Ricky Williams was a malcontent last year, not much liked in the locker room. This year, before he got hurt, he had turned all that around, and was a respected leader. The offensive line, which has no peer in the NFL, is even more interesting. Pro Bowl left tackle William Roaf started his NFL career with a flourish, a superbly agile dancer-type who could pass-block anyone with a heartbeat. Then he flattened out and became just another guy, doing barely enough to get by but nothing extra. The low point came three years ago, when Atlanta's Chuck Smith beat him for five sacks. Now Roaf has turned into a monster, a mean, aggressive drive blocker, to go with his pass-blocking skill. "He'd gotten overweight," Haslett says. "He'd been worn down by too many losing seasons. He needed some kind of change." "A nasty player now," Bunting says. "They all are on that unit." Right tackle Kyle Turley always had the nastiness, also the knack for picking up major penalties in the wrong situations. Now, as the fulcrum on the right side, the power side, he forms, along with Roaf, the best tackle tandem in football. Chris Naeole, the guard next to Turley, is a powerful drive blocker. He was once considered a wasted No. 1 draft pick. Left guard Wally Williams was a valuable free-agent pickup from Baltimore last year, and center Jerry Fontenot, an ex-Bear, is the glue that holds the unit together. Stripped of a first- and third-round draft choice, holdovers from the Ricky Williams deal, the Saints still have gotten valuable service from their rookies, three of whom started against the Rams. It's a team that's been crippled by injuries and there's no way they should be leading their division, but here they are. "Take the guys on our injured reserve list," Haslett says, "and you could put a hell of a team together. Just watch us next year." Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and CNNSI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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