Well that was a hell of a lot more fun than last week, don't you think? Our Heroes (and Greg McMahon) finally made their triumphant return to the Dome Saturday night, and it was about as crunk as a preseason game can get. It probably helped that thousands of the fans in attendance had already gotten fully precrunkified while enjoying a brand new urban tailgating experience™ at Champions Square Brought To You By Verizon™. It also helped that the Saints' performance was a hell of a lot more like we've come to expect here lately. And of course, we all know why. The Saints are just a whole different team when Morstead's healthy.

You knew it was gonna be a good night right from the start. The Saints' first series was a 12-play, 72-yard touchdown drive which featured 38 rushing yards by Good Reggie, including runs of 8, 8, 9 and 13 yards. Holy shit. Reg-gie! Reg-gie! Reg-gie! We here at moosedenied totally think he's finally turned the corner. No, really.

It was a damn fine rushing performance for the Saints all night and all around, actually. The Saints ran the ball 46(!!!) times for 198(!!!) yards at a rate of 4.3 yards per carry overall. I repeat: Holy shit. Leave it to Sean Canfield to ruin a 200 yard rushing performance by losing 3 yards on 3 plays from the Victory Formation. CANFIELD!!!!!!

Reggie posted a legit 7 yards per carry for the evening. PJ Hill chimed in to the tune of 5.3 yards per carry. Chris Ivory carried most of the load with 66 yards on 20 carries. There's been a little (just a little) grumbling on the message boards about Ivory's seemingly paltry 3.3 yards per carry, but CST put a graphic up late in the 3rd quarter and Ivory was at 4.5ypc at the time. They put the graphic up again midway through the 4th and he was still at 4.0ypc. At the end of the day, it was more situational than anything.

Pierre had a relatively quiet night on the ground, but we had ourselves yet another Mean Joe Screen moment. Is it just me, or has the screen to Pierre overtaken Drew standing still in a huge pocket and winding up for a deep one as the Official "Holy Shit, Here It Comes" Moment (Brought To You By Verizon™) on offense?

Adrian Arrington had another pretty impressive performance, 3 receptions for 71 yards. And as we promised last week, moosedenied has responded with a raised left eyebrow and a chin stroke.

You know, I'd really like to be happy about this. I really would. But it's just so damn hard. I know it's not his fault that every time he catches a pass, Message Board Guy immediately starts trying to trade Lance Moore or Devery Henderson to the Redskins for Albert Haynesworth. Again. But, what can I tell ya? One thing Message Board Guy and I have in common is that when we're pissed off, properly placing the blame is pretty low on our list of priorities. Sorry, Adrian.

The good news is that, one way or the other, I'll get over it sometime in the next two weeks. The Saints will either choose to carry six wideouts (and at this point I'm strongly leaning toward the opinion that they oughta) or he'll be gone. Mercifully, for good this time.

Meantime, it sure has been fun seeing #87 in black & gold making plays again. 7 receptions for 158 yards over two games? Yowza. 22.57 yards per reception. That's good stuff right there.

But clearly the showstealer Saturday night was Chase Danielzzzzzz.

The diminutive waterbug (wait, what?) torpedoed the Texans so thoroughly, it apparently made Jeff Duncan turn into Pete Finney.

Hey, far be it from me to scoff at 15-21 for 182 yards and 3 touchdowns. And it's not like I (or you) really give half a shit about Patrick Ramsey. Honestly, I'm kinda hoping that Chase does end up winning the backup gig, if for no other reason than I'm not particularly excited about Ramsey continuing the Jamie Martin/Mark Brunell/Joey Harrington parade of retread chumps.

After all, 10 out of 10 Saints fans will tell you that "If Drew goes down, we're fucked regardless." Which is true, but I prefer to go with "Drew ain't going down anyway, asshole. NEVER! So shut up!"

I think Duncan's jumping the gun though juuuuuust a bit with the Jake Delhomme comparisons. I mean, really. At this point, the only things Daniel and Delhomme have in common are the fact that only half of Saints fans are capable of spelling their surnames correctly, and that by no fault of their own they were both born with a condition known as Glenn Frey Syndrome, in which a person's face just screams "douchebag" regardless of whether or not the person is in fact an actual douchebag. I mean, there's just nothing they can do about it. At some point, Jake realized this and decided to just go with it. Hey, if you're gonna do the time, might as well do the crime, right?

One can only hope that Chase will choose to eschew that particular path. Fortunately, all indications so far are that he's doing a great job with that. After all, he looks pretty much exactly like Ben Roethlisberger, and to date, as far as we know, he has resisted the urge to "kinda-sorta rape" about a dozen groupies. So he's got that going for him. High five!

Unfortunately for Chase, at the moment, the Saints' starting quarterback isn't Aaron Brooks. And it's not like he can follow Jake's path, what with the Saints penciled in as the NFC representative in the next ten Super Bowls and all.

In other news, Junior who?

Good news and bad news for Galette fans. The bad news is that Saturday night's game pretty much proves that they're burying him. The good news is that it's highly likely that they're doing so for purposes of sneaking him through waivers and putting him on the practice squad. He's the next Adrian Arrington! High five!

Meantime, the Saints held the Texans to 48 yards rushing on 14 carries, 3.4 yards per. Nice. Oh sure, Arian Foster went for 4.67 yards per carry. And Steve Slaton, who's a chump, went for 3.8 per. But… uh… well, see, the thing is… um… hey, they totally held Jeremiah Johnson to 1 yard on 2 carries! Yeah.

The good news is that when you're up by 14 at the end of the first quarter, and up by 18 at halftime, chances are the opponent isn't gonna have much more than 14 rushing attempts. And, well, that's kinda what the Saints do most of the time. Thank goodness.

Say, remember last year when the Chiefs and Bucs started firing assistant coaches with about 2 weeks left to the start of the regular season? Hey, all I'm saying is that Freddy Mac is already on the payroll and in the building. And I'm sure Steve Gleason would be open to taking over John Carney's consulting gig.

Juuuuust sayin'. If former Saints safety and special teams standout Steve Gleason can talk SupaSaint out of a Kevin-Baconesque funk, what unimaginable wonders could he do for the currently-mindbogglingly-shitty Saints coverage units?

Hey, something needs to be done. And pronto. I can't even remember the last time Jo-Lonn Dunbar knocked some chump plum craaaaazy. I've been waiting for him to debut his "that dude done juked me like a motherfucker" gesticulation, but I guess the cameramen have just been missing it. Probably because they tend to follow the ball.

Oh sure, the Texans had zero yards on two punt returns, including one turnover on a muffed punt. But you can pretty much chalk that up to the pungent aroma of Thomas Morstead's greatness, and the equally pungent shittiness of Trindon Holliday. I mean, talk about a double whammy.

Meantime, Steve Slaton (who, as previously noted, is a chump) posted a 63 yard kickoff return, and Jeremiah Johnson(!!!) had a 55 yarder. Guh.

That shit is getting really old, really fast.

Funny thing… know who used to be pretty damn good on special teams? Jason David.

And yeah, I just said that. It's that bad.

At least Morstead can tackle. Then again, is there anything Morstead can't do?

All things considered though, things seem to be coming along just fine. For the most part, the Saints delivered on that whole improvement from the first to the second preseason game thing. Big time.

Oh sure, they're all gonna tell us that there's still a long way to go, and they're right. Hell, we already knew that.

But in the meantime, I sure do feel a midseason form in week one vibe coming on once again. And that was big fun last year. My head is about to explode just thinking about how much fun it's gonna be this year.