OUT OF MAGIC
Saints dash hopes of Eagles defending their title
Nick Foles, indisputably, has magic. But the Saints are from New Orleans, so they have voodoo. And they stuck all the pins in Foles and the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.
No goal post would save the Birds this week. It seemed, near the end, that a field goal might once again play into the Eagles’ fortune, when Saints’ kicker Wil Lutz missed wide right on a 52-yard attempt that most likely would have iced the game. Surely, the same invisible hand that turned Bears’ kicker Cody Parkey’s would-be game winner into that unforgettable double doink last week had reached down from heaven again.
No. A little more than a minute later, Foles threw a pass to receiver Alshon Jeffery that went through his hands and was intercepted by the Saints’ Marshon Lattimore. The season that once was lost, and then was found, was lost again. The phrase “defending champions” was drained of meaning, just like that, and the Birds’ first-ever Super Bowl victory turned from warm memory into museum piece.
All because of the Saints. This was the team the Eagles fumbled and sputtered against in a 48-7 loss in November, a blowout that seemed to suggest last year’s championship may have merely been a divine sop to quiet the “poor us” moaning of longsuffering Philly fandom for a time.
The Birds, after all, had dug a hole too deep to crawl out of, in that dreary graveyard where first-to-worst teams are buried and forgotten. Except they did crawl out. And, it seemed, fate decided to use the same playbook as last year — down goes Wentz, in comes Foles, up comes the sun.
Fate is cruel more often than it is kind. When Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees threw an interception on his first pass, when the Eagles found the end zone on their first
two possessions, when the New Orleans faithful looked a little wide-eyed and confused — well, that’s when the pins and the Eagles dolls came out.
Fans can feel momentum shifting, as surely as they can feel high winds shaking the house. In the second quarter, Saints coach Sean Payton ordered a fake punt from the team’s own 30-yard line. The gamble worked. The house shook. And even though the Eagles went into the half up 14-10, it didn’t really feel like a lead. The Saints, it was clear, had scrubbed away the rust of their long layoff.
The third quarter came along. Never mind the third quarter. New Orleans ate up 11:29 of it on an 18-play drive. They should have been called for ball-hogging.
The Birds were swooning. Their strategy, for a time, seemed to consist of having poor Wendell Smallwood run again and again into a dense thicket of Saints. It never worked. The defense grew weary and its keystone, Fletcher Cox, was hobbled by a foot injury.
Back in Pennsylvania, in Chickie’s and Pete’s and Dave and Buster’s and Buffalo Wild Wings and your house and my house, jaws clenched and prayers rose to St. Chuck and St. Reggie.
Nothing worked. The Saints kept converting on third down and the Superdome kept getting louder and louder. Crowd noise isn’t supposed to trouble Foles — one of the talking heads, Jimmy or Terry or Howie, said so just before the game — but it couldn’t have helped. You could have heard that ruckus even if it weren’t on television.
The Saints. They used to be called the ’Aints until Drew Brees came along. He is about to turn 40 and his arm and eyes seem as strong and precise as ever, a full 10 years after leading the franchise to its first Super Bowl title.
Boy, do we hate him. Before the game, we might have had a warm feeling toward him because he and Foles are graduates of the same Texas high school, and that made for a nice timefilling feature in the endless run-up to the game. Now he’s just a villain.
At the moment, that is. By next week, we’ll want Brees and his Saints to win the whole thing, so we know the Birds — no longer fortune’s favorites — lost to the very best.