The Saints are Back

Whatever fairy dust or pixie magic floated through the New Orleans Saints season last year has officially been dissipated by the heat and rain of a Louisiana summer.

For the second year in a row, I had the fortune of attending the Monday night home opener. If you care, you've already seen the highlights and heard or read about what happened on the field.

If you don't care enough to have been paying attention, the Saints have started with three straight losses, and none of them were really close. The million dollar question is why last year's best offense in the league has suddenly become ineffective. You might have also missed the "when it rains it pours" note that Deuce McAllister is out for the season, and the pessimistic note that an ACL injury for a running back at his age is often the end of a career. Man oh man.

Yes, the Saints that we know and love are back. And so for the first time in franchise history, 30,000 people know how it feels to be on the waiting list to spend hundreds of dollars for season tickets to the crappiest team in the history of the NFL.

On the bright side, the bloody marys in the Superdome are top-notch. We should refer to it as a waiting list for Superdome bloody marys.

The crowd -- including Eddie and me -- were loud and enthusiastic in the first quarter. After that, we were loud and enthusiastic on defensive 3rd downs until the middle of the third quarter. After that, it was pretty quiet.

To blow off some frustration, Eddie and I stopped a twelve-year-old kid on his way out of the stadium. He was wearing a Drew Brees jersey, and Brees had 3 interceptions and a fumble, so we beat the kid up.

That felt good, so we decided to do it again. Not wishing to suffer any personal injury, this time we found a chubby woman in a Brees jersey and beat her up.

While these fans might have deserved their ass-kickings, I feel kind of bad about the two Chinese students outside the Superdome. Their backpacks and calculus books suggest that they were just looking for a library in which to study, when they got beat up for no reason.

Outside of the game, it was a fun night. On top of our little fantasies about pummeling the young, female, and Asian, we made fun of a friend of ours from college, who I'll just call "Troy."

(I just think it's goofy when people put names in quotation marks. His name really was Troy. We were actually friends with two guys named Troy, but we called the other one Guido, so as not to confuse ourselves.)

Troy's claim to fame is that he cheated his way to a Mechanical Engineering degree. It took him six or seven years, but he finally made it through. Back in the early 90s, copy machines were still big, heavy, expensive devices where you had to feed change for every page you wanted to copy. Troy copied so much homework, he actually had one of these in his apartment. It takes a lot of copying of 5 cent pages to make it a better option to get your own copy machine. We used to make fun of the tan on his face from the bluish light that slid back and forth during the course of making a copy.

LSU back then still had dot matrix printers that fed those huge wide sheets of paper that had thick blue-green lines. Troy once printed out a bunch of code, folded the big printout into a seat liner, parked his behind on it during a test, and pulled it out for reference during a test. I can't imagine how he didn't get caught pulling out the big wide green sheet, but he was obviously a master at cheating.

The equivalent in today's classroom would be a student who sits on his laptop during tests, and discretely pulls it out from under his ass to reference during a test.