Yikes.

I would like to take this opportunity to send my heartfelt thanks to the LSU football team for giving me just enough reason not to shoot myself in the face and crotch this weekend. LSU’s performance was the only thing keeping it from being one of the more craptacular weekends in recent memory. I knew that being a shameless HOMER(!!!!!!) would come in handy someday.

The Saints’ performance last Thursday night was straight up asstastic. Coach Mora said it best: "It was a horseshit performance in the second half. Horseshit." It was an ass-kicking of epic proportions. A humiliating kick to the crotch. Not since the last time the Saints played Indy have they been so completely and thoroughly handled.

I won’t bore or further sicken you, or myself, by rehashing the gory details. We’ve all hashed it and rehashed it ad infinitum since then. Those of us who are masochistic enough to spend time on message boards have watched as hundreds have tried for the last four days to one-up one another and win the coveted "most inane, overwrought, nonsensical hissy-fit" award. If the game didn’t make you cry, surely the aftermath has made you weep for the state of the human condition amongst the message board population.

One thing you can always count on after a demoralizing loss is that the blame will be flying in all directions. It’s everybody’s fault from Jason David to Sean Payton to Kevin Houser to John Madden to John Cougar. I even read one guy state that the Saints were simultaneously overconfident and lacking swagger. Yep, right there contained within a single sentence. Any semblance of rational thinking and self control goes completely out the window. And then after everyone has had their fill of overreacting and heaping their bile on the Saints, the leftovers start being thrown at one another. I’d like to take a paragraph to address those people, if you don’t mind…

Hey you. Asshole. Yeah you, asshole. Try getting a fucking grip and stop embarrassing yourself. You’re making me want to shove an icepick in my eye. You want to "vent" because pitching a fit like a spoiled child makes you feel better? Great, try having an ounce of dignity and do it where others don’t have to look at it. Try maintaining a sliver of self-respect and don’t subject others to your wallowing in your own crapulence. Step away from the keyboard until you can at least maintain the appearance of being at least slightly smarter than a box of hair. And seriously, consider suicide. I’m just sayin’.

Everybody has their pet theory as to why the Saints played the role of Tina Turner to the Colts’ Ike last Thursday. But what I think it comes down to is real simple: The Colts are simply a far better team than the Saints right now. I didn’t believe that going in, but I sure as hell believe it now. They’re better offensively, they’re better defensively, their coaches are better.

Our friend NolaChick over at Chicks In The Huddle thinks that the Saints were overconfident. That they bought into their own hype. That’s a perfectly reasonable observation, and she might be right, but I think I disagree. That seems like more of a Haslett thing to me. I think it’s more likely that the Saints had already bought into the Colts’ hype. That they were beaten between the ears even before kickoff. They were intimidated. All indications so far are that Coach Payton has the makings of a legendary redass. Sometimes guys like that can be so focused on staying humble and not getting overconfident, that they run the risk of going overboard and undermining the healthy confidence that keeps a team from bending over and having the opponent’s will shoved up their asses.

There were signs of possible trouble even before the game. For some reason I hope to someday understand, the Saints released Rob Ninkovich before the game, left Fred Thomas inactive and brought a third quarterback and fifth tight end onto the roster (four active.) Maybe it makes perfect sense, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out the logic.

I’ve read people blame it on Ninkovich’s injuries. But weren’t we told on Wednesday that everybody was ready to go? Everybody was perfectly healthy and 100%? Maybe I’m an idiot, but I was kind of assuming everybody meant everybody. Including Ninkovich.

If you’re the opinion that Fred Thomas sucks (I’m not) then maybe that part makes perfect sense to you. But if they left Freddy T inactive for that reason, then why in the blue hell is he on the roster in the first place?

I’ve read that maybe Palko was brought back onto the 53-man because somebody else might have been about to sign him off the practice squad. But the problem with that logic is that just days ago the front office and Coach Payton made a conscious decision to expose Palko to waivers and release him. Why the sudden fear of losing him? A common misconception is that players are "cut in order to be put on the practice squad." But that’s not the case. A cut is a cut. Once you’ve made the decision to release a player, you’ve ceded control of that player. You have to have already decided that you can live with losing him, because if he’s claimed off waivers or pulls a Hass and signs elsewhere, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. If you can’t bear the thought of losing the guy, it never gets to the point of releasing him and exposing him to waivers/free agency. Sure, you may want to bring him back to the practice squad, but ultimately, you don’t control whether or not that happens. So by releasing him in the first place, even though you might like to have him on the practice squad, you first have to decide that he’s not important enough to keep under your control, and that it’s not the end of the world if you lose him. Surely Palko didn’t significantly improve to the point of being indispensible over the course of a few days.

Our friend Dillyberto has floated the notion that something might be wrong with Drew. I have no idea whether or not that’s the case, but what we do know is that it wasn’t enough of an issue to not start Drew. If it were, I would understand the need for a second quarterback behind Martin. But as it turned out, it would have required injuries to both Drew and Martin for Palko’s presence or absence to have even been a factor. What the hell were the chances of that?

And don’t even get me started on the desperate need to have Ronnie Ghent on the roster for the Colts game. Sure, Campbell was inactive. So the hell what? Three isn’t enough? Was the world going to end if the Saints didn’t have a fourth tight end available?

That whole series of moves just reeks of panic. For reasons I just can’t wrap my mind around. The only thing that makes sense to me, given the (lack of) information at hand, is that someone lost their hold on a situation. Maybe Drew felt a twinge in his shoulder or something, and it sent Coach and Mickey bouncing off the walls, and before they knew it they had made a series of moves that they later looked at each other and said "What the fuck was all that about?"

As for the actual game, thankfully, the LSU vs. VA Tech game gave me a bit of sorely-needed perspective afterwards. I’m sure there’s some truth to the now-prevailing wisdom that VA Tech might have been overrated to some degree going in. And I suppose that’s possibly true of the Saints too. But objectively, I know damn well that VA Tech is not a bad team. They’re going to be right there in the mix for the ACC Championship. Their defense is going to be among the best in the nation by the end of the season. They might not be the #9 team in the country, but it’s at least as likely as not that they’ll end the season ranked somewhere near there.

VT simply ran into a buzzsaw Saturday night, simple as that. They didn’t play as well as they’re accustomed to playing. Part of that was their fault, and part of it was that their opponent was a superior team that brought its A game that night, and there wasn’t jack shit VT could do about it.

For some reason it’s easier to see it that way when it’s not your team on the short end of that stick. It took seeing it from the other perspective for me to conclude that the same thing happened to the Saints Thursday night. The Saints were VT to the Colts’ LSU. The Saints ran into a superior opponent who just had it all going that night. Meanwhile the Saints exacerbated the problem by going all "diddly-poo" in the seond half. Like VT, the Saints were on the road in an environment that had to have been intimidating, what with the unfurling and such. And they got their asses handed to them just like VT did.

Some VT fans are probably going apeshit right about now too. It’s hard not to doubt everything after such a thrashing. But VT still has a couple of ass-kicking linebackers. They still have an outstanding defense. They may still be the best team in the ACC. Similarly, the Saints still have an ass-kicking offense. They still have a Top 3™ quarterback. They still have Reggie Bush, who didn’t just become a chump overnight. They still have a defense that most of the time can still be described as "serviceable" (hey, we’ll take what we can get.) They still might be the best team in the NFC South, and for that matter, they still might be the best team in the NFC.

But when we as fans have ourselves psyched into believing our team is even better than that, when we have convinced ourselves of not just division superiority, not just playoffs, not just a BCS Bowl, but that our team is going to steamroll their way right into Best In All The Land status, well, the fall can be hard, even if that fall is only back to the comparatively lofty heights from whence you began. When you’ve psyched yourself into believing your team is invincible, it can be a bitch having to accept vincibility.

If it’s any consolation, and as far as I’m concerned it is, the same damn thing is happening to Bears fans today.

Meantime, I as a fan am not about to give up my overconfidence in our team over one ass-kicking from what will probably turn out to be the best team in the league. Screw that, overconfidence is one of the finer pleasures of being a fan of a team that, at least in theory, is one of the better teams in the league. In all my almost 35 years on this planet, precious and few have been the moments where I can be obnoxiously overconfident about my New Orleans Saints. I’ll be damned if one game is going to take that pleasure away from me. Hell no, I’m milking that shit for all it’s worth. I’ll know it’s time to stop when I can’t start pimping the Saints at every opportunity while keeping a straight face. That time is not now, and it’s going to be quite a long while yet.

Tampa Bay has no idea the horrors that are about to be unleashed upon them.

Until then, chin up, bitches. It’ll all be better in six days. This team isn’t invincible, not by a long shot. But it’s damn good. Better than most. They’ll remind us of that soon enough.