Saints Coach Sean Payton said tailback Deuce McAllister was signed to lead the team out onto the field and serve as a captain, but not to play in Saturday’s playoff opener against the Arizona Cardinals.
Originally, McAllister had agreed to serve as a guest captain for the game to help fire up the team and the fans. Then when defensive tackle Rodney Leisle suffered a knee injury, General Manager Mickey Loomis suggested that they should sign McAllister to the roster to make him an official part of the team.
McAllister, who has not been with a team since the Saints released him in February, isn’t quite ready to jump right back into the action, though.
“This is more about doing something the right way and bringing the guy back,” said Payton, who said he contacted McAllister about three weeks ago to see if he would be available.
NEW ORLEANS — The talent, the gaudy numbers and even the name have made it so you no longer have to argue that Drew Brees is an elite quarterback.
You can throw his name in any sentence that involves Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Brett Favre and Kurt Warner. In this, his fourth season as quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, Brees’ stock only continued to soar as he led his team to a franchise-record 13 wins. He belongs in any argument about the league’s best quarterbacks.
But how do you stop the qualifiers like, “Yeah, he’s as good as those guys, but what’s he ever won?’’ Or how do you stop the perceived snubs when Manning, who had basically the same numbers, goes out and wins the Most Valuable Player Award in a landslide over Brees?
It’s real simple. Brees needs to win big games. We’re talking big games like Saturday’s divisional playoff against Arizona and Warner, who has been one of the best postseason quarterbacks in history. We’re talking big games like the NFC Championship Game and the Super Bowl.
“Who dat?” is older than us all, but its association with the New Orleans Saints first flowered in 1983.
That was the season that an intrepid former World Series hero teamed with two enterprising brothers, a Neville and several Saints players to forever cement the phrase
Ron Swoboda, whose diving, game-saving catch for the 1969 New York Mets remains one of the all-time World Series highlights, had come to New Orleans to replace a legend when sportscaster and master grammarian Bernard “Buddy D” Diliberto jumped from then-ABC affiliate WVUE-Channel 8 to NBC affiliate WDSU-Channel 6.
One of the jobs Swoboda got as Diliberto’s impossible successor at WVUE was hosting a prime-time show — “On Sports” — that led into “Monday Night Football.”
Swoboda segmented that highlights-and-high-jinks hour into time for prep football, LSU, Tulane, and of course, the Saints.
If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear a lot this week about Kurt Warner’s glitzy postseason history.
Michael DeMocker/The Times-Picayune
Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner has great statistics in postseason play.
The Arizona Cardinals quarterback improved his playoff record to 9-3 in Sunday’s 51-45 overtime win against Green Bay. His postseason passer rating of 104.6 is second in NFL history to Bart Starr (104.8). He’s the first quarterback in NFL history to throw four or more touchdown passes in three playoffs games. He and Peyton Manning are the only passers to record efficiency ratings of 145.0 or higher in two postseason games.
By Mike Triplett, The Times-Picayune January 14, 2010, 9:19AM
Saints quarterback Drew Brees is backing up Peyton Manning again. Manning was named the first-team All Pro quarterback by the Associated Press, with Brees landing on the second team. Manning received 36 1/2 of the 50 votes by media members across the country, with Brees receiving 12 1/2 votes. Two Saints players were named first-team All-Pros — guard Jahri Evans and safety Darren Sharper. Sharper was a near-unanimous choice with 46 votes. Evans finished second among guards with 28 votes. Middle linebacker Jonathan Vilma and offensive tackle Jon Stionchcomb just missed the second team. They both finished fifth in the voting at their respective positions.
“Unbelievable,” said Brees, who watched the second half of the game at home after the Saints wrapped up their practice and meetings at the team facility earlier in the day.
The highest-scoring playoff game in NFL history was a crowd-pleaser, to say the least, but it was especially compelling to the Saints and their fans since the winning team earned a trip to the Superdome on Saturday to face the Saints in Round 2.
Kickoff is set for 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. Now the opponent is set, too – the NFC West champion Cardinals (11-6), who reached the Super Bowl last year before falling in the final minutes to the NFL champion Pittsburgh Steelers.
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