If ever there were a case study on why football fans shouldn’t overreact to the first thing they see during a season, it’s the New Orleans Saints.

Care to go back and look at those comments after Week One, when the Saints got dismantled by Tampa Bay to the tune of 48-40?

Probably not, because if you are a Saints fan, you’re going to look really, really stupid.

People wait nine months for their team to start a new season and they take nine minutes after that first game to make grand pronouncements about what they have just seen. Do you hear anybody claim the Saints as the NFL’s best team after the dusting they took by the now-lowly Bucs?

Here’s what the reality is, at least in Week Whatever This Is — the New Orleans Saints are the best team in the NFL. You hated their defense, but they only allowed 14 points to Cincinnati and half of those points came in garbage time. The Bengals are a potential playoff team in the AFC.

You said they can’t win on the road, but they went to Minnesota, thought to be one of the best teams in the NFC, and laid waste to the Vikings.

You said they can’t win outdoors, but that Bengals game wasn’t played indoors and the Ravens game wasn’t played indoors.

There’s still plenty of football to be played and it’s the NFL, where anybody can lose to anybody in a given week. But if this were college football and they were voting, the Saints would have the best case to be voted No. 1.

Sure, New England is the Alabama of the NFL and everyone is in love with the Kansas City Chiefs. The Los Angeles Rams have only loss, but of course you realize who administered that.

Don’t make Super Bowl plans quite yet. But at something resembling the halfway point of the 2018 season, things sure do look a lot different than they did in early September.