The Saints had plenty to celebrate Sunday, earning a trip to Minnesota for an NFC semifinal. (Butch Dill/AP)
NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Saints were done dancing and celebrating in their locker room, done waving a broom to commemorate their three-game sweep of the Carolina Panthers this season with Sunday’s triumph in a first-round NFC playoff game to earn a trip to Minnesota to face the Vikings in a conference semifinal this coming weekend.
And yet Drew Brees was not about to gloat. The Panthers essentially had dared Brees, the quarterback who owns five of the nine 5,000-yard passing seasons in NFL history, to beat them, employing a defensive game plan in which the top priority was to slow Pro Bowlers Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara. And Brees had done just that, beating the Panthers by throwing for 376 yards and two touchdowns in the 31-26 triumph that ended Carolina’s season.
[It was a turn-back-the-clock performance for Drew Brees]
But if Brees was offended by the slight, he wasn’t about to show it. Instead, he reveled in having a team around him that’s good enough to help him get back to another Super Bowl.
“We trust our system,” Brees said Sunday night at the Superdome. “We trust each other. And I think what we’ve proved is that we can beat you in a lot of different ways …. It became obvious very early on that they wanted to stop the run and that was gonna provide us with some opportunities outside.”
There simply cannot have been many times during Brees’s tenure in New Orleans that he has seen an opposing defense use such a stop-the-run strategy, particularly in a game of such significance. But he dismissed that with what amounted to a shrug, saying: “That happens every now and then.”
Brees is a week shy of his 39th birthday. There are more days behind him than ahead of him in his NFL career. But give him a chance to sling the football all over the field, and he still can get it done. The Vikings had better take note.
“I think when you play defensively, you look at the games past and you look at: ‘Hey, what can we take away that hurt us in the first two games? How can we apply pressure? How can we get them off their balance?’ ” Saints Coach Sean Payton said. “If you’re rushing five, six, seven yards a carry, it becomes easier. So I don’t think it was a challenge [to Brees] as much as just how they wanted to defend us.”
Even before Brees’s vintage performance, Payton had made it a throwback weekend by having members of the Saints’ Super Bowl-winning team from the 2009 season on hand.
“We just wanted to create a great environment …. I love it when these guys come back,” Payton said. “That, to me, is a sign that you have a program. So I want them always to feel welcome, that they were a big part of what all of us are currently standing on.”
Brees said it made for a special reunion.
“It was awesome,” he said. “All those guys are former teammates of mine. The list gets fewer and fewer of the guys that are still on the team that played with that group. [Former Saints assistant coach] Joe Vitt probably had one of the best sayings way back when he said, ‘You win a Super Bowl, you walk together forever.’ And we accomplished that, and you feel like there’s a brotherhood that will always be there.
“Guys live in different parts of the country. They have their families. They have their lives. They have all this stuff going on. You may not talk to them for a long time. And yet when you get back together, it’s as if no time has passed. That’s the way it was [Saturday] seeing all those guys …. There’s a brotherhood there, a kinship that can never be broken.”
The feel-good vibe of the weekend nearly was broken. Payton created some anxious late-game moments Sunday when he dialed up a fourth-and-two gamble from the Carolina 47-yard line in the final two minutes.
“He said, ‘Do you want to go for it or punt?’ ” Brees said. “I said, ‘You got a play you like?’ He said yeah. I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ So, end of discussion.”
It didn’t work. Brees threw an interception, and the Panthers drove toward a possible game-winning touchdown. But the Carolina drive stalled in part because of an intentional grounding penalty called on quarterback Cam Newton, much to the Panthers’ dismay, and Newton was sacked on fourth down in the final seconds to seal the outcome.
[Questions raised about the Panthers’ handling of Cam Newton’s injury]
“At the end of the day, we did enough to win,” Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan said. “And we’re gonna focus on Minnesota to get another win. And after that, we’ll focus on whoever our next opponent is gonna be for another win. We’ve got expectations. Again, I’ve been saying it all year: We’ve got loftier goals.”
It’s a return trip to Minneapolis for the Saints. They lost at Minnesota, 29-19, in their season opener. That was part of an 0-2 beginning that gave way to an eight-game winning streak. For the Saints, the progress since Opening Day has been considerable.
“It’s night and day,” Brees said. “You’re still trying to find yourself. You’re still trying to establish your identity. So that feels like ages and ages ago. Listen, they’ve earned the right to be in the position they’re in. It’s an extremely tough place to play. It’s a very, very good football team all the way around. [Vikings quarterback] Case Keenum has played phenomenal this year for them on offense and that defense is as stout as ever. So we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
But first, for at least a few moments, Brees was going to savor what happened Sunday in the Superdome.
“You try to enjoy as many of these moments as possible because it’s not gonna last forever,” Brees said. “And certainly these are the memories that you hang on to, especially in big games like this when you’re talking playoffs, when you’re talking taking the next step forward to achieving your ultimate goal.”
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