New Orleans Saints must win, receive help to stay alive for playoffs
The players of the New Orleans Saints are aware of their current situation, having given up the dominance they had battled for weeks to keep. They now have two more regular-season games remaining, the first of which is on Sunday at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida against the Buccaneers (8-7).
New Orleans (7-8) needs to defeat its NFC South Division rivals on Sunday in order to remain in the playoff hunt.
Next weekend’s game versus the Falcons (7-8) in the Caesars Superdome will mark the end of the regular season.
“A have-to-win mentality,” center Erik McCoy said. “I mean, you say that every week, it’s a have-to-win game, because it’s the next game. But, truly, if you want to have any chance at playing in the playoffs, you have to win the last two. So I think that’s the mentality and the mode that everyone is in.
“I just coin it as a must-win. Because I want to go to the playoffs, everybody in this building wants to go to the playoffs.”
“It’s definitely tough, because you look back on the year and the coulda, shoulda, wouldas,” tight end Juwan Johnson said.
“But at the end of the day, it’s like, what can we do from now on? Because if you lose another game, it really doesn’t matter at all.
“So, I believe that winning these next two games is crucial because the last thing you want is to lose the game even though everything goes according to plan and you wind up losing.” Thus, let’s just focus on winning these next two games and all the others will take care of itself.
“These last two games in particular, you have to be in playoff mode. Since you’re done if you lose. And it truly is that simple. It’s not as if someone else wins and you lose and you’re done. It is the time of year.”
In order to win, the Saints will have to accomplish something – play a well-rounded game – which sparingly has been achieved this season.
HC Allen Dennis…
“We just haven’t been able to put all three phases together consistently enough,” Coach Dennis Allen said. “That’s been a source of frustration for our football team, because there’s been moments where it’s looked the way it’s supposed to look, and there have been moments when it hasn’t.
“I think there are a lot of statistics that we can go through where we’d say, we’ve done good things. But we haven’t finished and we haven’t won enough. And I think all of us understand that this is a profession, this is a production-based business. I don’t think anybody’s trying to skirt that. We’ve got to do a better job of producing and producing wins.”
Allen said he has no doubt the team will approach the games the right way.
“For everybody, when you’re in this league every time you get an opportunity to take the field, you need to make sure you’re taking advantage of it,” he said. “So, we need to go play good football, and we need to get a win and it starts this week against Tampa.”
Johnson said that looking in the rear view and reminiscing about what could have been isn’t productive now.
Of course it’s frustrating, because you want it to be so good,” he said. “We know what we could have been at the start of this year, what the expectations were not from the outside, but from within, and what we thought it was.
“But we are here now, it is what it is right now so the biggest thing, we have to win. No matter what the expectation was going into the season, this is what we are, this is what it is and we have to win. You want to reflect on, ‘It could have been this,’ but it’s not.”
NOT THIS WEEK: Although Allen stated that some injured players will probably return to practice this week, he does not anticipate that receiver Michael Thomas (knee) or cornerback Marshon Lattimore (ankle) will be among them. Following their injuries against the Vikings on November 12, Lattimore and Thomas were both placed on injured reserve. Although they are both eligible to return, neither has been able to take part in practice.
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