Mike Hoss

The Saints were reminded this season, as they were last season, that one cannot rely on other teams to provide even a sliver of help down the stretch to make the NFL playoffs. This season, the Saints only needed that help after allowing Tom Brady an opening to do what he does better than anyone else. It took a month to fully sink in, but the Bucs’ rally from a 13-point deficit in the final 5 minutes on Monday Night Football in early December is what ended the Saints’ 2022 season in early January.

This has been a very challenging season, and that’s putting it as mildly as possible. The Saints have not won back-to-back games all year. Now they hope for a miracle 4-game winning streak to close out the year at 8-9 and see if more chaos ensues around them. Most 5-9 seasons are riddled with mistakes and injuries. In that way the 2022 Saints campaign is right where you’d expect it to be.

The 2022 NFL season has been week after week of insanity across the board, it’s not JUST a New Orleans thing. But still, the week off allowed us to sit back and try to digest it all. The result was serious reflux, at least in my case. But a closer look at this ongoing Saints campaign highlights just how out of the norm it has truly been. Well, unless this is the new-norm, and I’m not even thinking about that. It’s the holidays for gosh sakes.