Welcome everyone to the latest edition of #4Downs where I break down the New Orleans Saints loss to the Minnesota Vikings.
1st Down: Redzone Inefficiency
The Saints need to figure out why their redzone offense isn’t working. Five trips and the Saints only scored one time from 20-yards out and that was in the final minutes of a loss against the Vikings.
With the way the Saints defense has been the last couple of seasons, there will need to be a lot of improvement from the offense is they want to win games this season.
2nd Down: Defense Underwhelms
All preseason long, it seemed like the Saints defense turned things around. They looked ready to take on some of the best offenses in the NFL and hold then to under 30 points a game.
That wasn’t the case on Monday night as the defense allowed 470 total yards of offense and saw De’Vante Harris get burnt by Stefon Diggs a couple of times. It also continued to prove the narrative of the Saints defense making a former Heisman Trophy winner look like a million bucks.
3rd Down: More Things Change
Even with all the offseason acquisitions the Saints had, it just seemed like the same old team that looks to be set to go 7-9 for the umpteenth time. The defensive performance as mentioned earlier was horrid, there was no real run game to speak of. The only thing that slightly changed was the fact that Wil Lutz made every one of his field goals, but that only matters to the handful of fantasy football players that had him starting this week. After four weeks of hype from their performance in the preseason, the same old team trotted out there and took a season-opening loss against the Vikings.
4th Down: Trouble in Paradise?
One week into the regular season and it looks like there’s already some trouble in paradise between Sean Payton and Adrian Peterson. For those interested, the former Viking wound up only playing nine total snaps against his old team.
At one point during the broadcast, the cameras switched over to Peterson yelling at Payton about “running the ball up the donkey” and the Saints head coach turned around and said something to quickly defuse the situation. Is it just me or are more players for the Saints complaining about not getting enough touches? Last year we had Brandin Cooks and Mark Ingram have moments similar to it, now we’ve got a veteran complaining about it as well.
Perhaps there are too many cooks in the kitchen offensively to please everybody and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to this team.
-Clint Domingue