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.

(From Designated Contributor Don Walker in our Florida/East Coast Offices…)

Greetings from A Land Afar.

How “afar” is it?

It’s afar enough that:

• It snowed in Shreveport today while we topped out at a record 88 degrees here in sunny Brevard County, Fla.
• The “tropical wave” churning the waters of the Atlantic hinter islands had threatened to put the prospects of my Thanksgiving Day turkey meal into the “Cone of Uncertainty.”
• My at-home cable subscription that only shows Florida teams forced me to go to Buffalo Wild Wings on Sunday to see another New Orleans Saints victory while the wife and I laissez le bon temps rouler-ed with a shrimp Po-boy and hot buffalo wings doused in creamy Ranch dressing.
• A Modern Stone Age Florida man dressed as Fred Flintstone was arrested while driving a foot mobile: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2018/11/13/police-mock-arrest-man-and-car-dressed-fred-flintstone/38514365/
• More than a week after Election Day voting machines across the nation were locked and stored back at their respective warehouses, Florida is still counting!
• Nick Saban fantasizes about a head coaching gig at the University of Central Florida, where the Knights have self-declared themselves National Champions and have stretched their winning streak to 22 games.
• Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are playing a post-Thanksgiving pay-per-view round of match play golf for $9 million. That would be No. 13-ranked Tiger versus 27-ranked Phil. The only way I would watch this, let alone pay to watch it, is if it was $9M of their own money at stake.
• While white water rafting in a glacier-fed Alaskan river, a guide said this to me after I asked him a question: “My Mom was a school teacher. She always said, ‘There’s no such thing as a stupid question. However, there are lots of inquisitive idiots.’ ” Wait, what?
• I said this while eating breakfast on Saturday: “You can’t andouille what’s already been ‘douilled.”

Hopefully one of these made you smile.

From the balmy Atlantic Shore,

Donnie Golfgame

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