This has to be terribly bitter for Saints fans, especially after their miraculous loss last year. Two consecutive gut-wrenching defeats in the playoffs. And I have no sympathy whatsoever for them. Not even a tiny bit. After the Tom Mack penalty, and many other bitter defeats throughout the 70s, I just can’t say that winning a game with an assist like that bothers me in the least. I’m not experiencing my typical schadenfreude either, however, because I don’t care about the Saints. If this had happened to the Vikings, I would not be able to get enough of their fans’ tears. But I’m just without any sympathy for Saints fans.
But as I was saying, a lifetime (this, I realized, is my 50th anniversary of being a Rams fan)…a lifetime of mostly losing has taught me not to cry about referees, or bad bounces, or dropped passes (Cromwell), or loud crowds. They are each and every one a part of the game, and there is no use crying about it. At the end, when the final gun sounds, your team either has more points, or it doesn’t. And complaining about This or That, or What If is just a waste.
So this past week I made the case over at the Herd, and also on this pretty bad FB page, that the petition to the NFL to change the ref in this game was nonsense, and if you don’t want a ref to screw you over…SCORE MORE POINTS. Score more points, and take the possibility of a bad call out of the equation. Don’t cry to me about a bad call. There were other bad non-calls in that game (as others have mentioned), and that’s the way it goes. The Rams…in the end…out-dueled them. They limited the Saints to FGs in the beginning, and harassed them all day long. Donald made plays, Fowler, Suh, Littleton.
And GOFF! Goff showed me something really, really big today. His numbers weren’t great (they were pretty good, though), but he held that team together through hurricane force crowd noise that lasted the entire game, but was especially fierce in the first quarter. I don’t think last year’s Goff would have made it. That was F-ing magnificent. He kept that team going, right into the teeth of that noise, and a very stiff New Orleans defense that played very well.
And Zuerlein, baby. Two clutch kicks. And no gimme chip shots, either. Those were manly kicks. That was championship football we saw today.
This is now officially a bad-ass team.
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Agamemnon
