They Would Be Saint Elsewhere Without Haslett

One of the season’s surprise success-story teams, the New Orleans Saints, will line up in St. Louis today without the two players who did the most to turn things around this fall in the Superdome.

They are Jeff Blake, the quarterback who broke a foot in the first quarter of the Oakland game last week as New Orleans’ winning streak ended at six, 31- 22, and Ricky Williams, the running back who broke an ankle seven days earlier.

“Injuries are by far the worst thing about football,” Oakland owner Al Davis says. “It’s such a beautiful game until people get hurt.”

You can look it up: Injury luck controls the destiny of every good pro club.

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BRONC0S UNDERSTAND: The Denver Broncos present the most conspicuous recent example of NFL injury luck--good and bad.

Like most champions before them, and the one after, the 1997-98 Broncos escaped serious injury to win consecutive Super Bowls.

Then in 1999-2000, Denver lost many of its best players, running back Terrell Davis and quarterback Brian Griese among them, and can’t get back to the top.

Injury luck influences other sports, too, but it’s seldom the controlling influence elsewhere.

When you hit a home run, you rarely break an ankle jogging around second base.

You seldom break a foot dunking a basketball.

In most sports, injuries are a nuisance.

In football, they’re a menace.

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FLUKE INJURIES: Because human beings are involved in eight or 10 violent collisions on every play of every NFL game, sports fans expect and accept injuries as a fact of life in football.

Still, some of football’s worst injuries are suffered on fluke plays.

More than one seemingly superbly-conditioned running back has taken a season-ending hit from himself--while cutting sharply, perhaps, to evade an opponent.

Football is, in fact, so continuously threatening to the human body that many players are critically injured on simple, routine plays.

Thus, New Orleans running back Williams broke his ankle this month on an end run when tackled cleanly, almost gently, by but one opponent.

A week later, the New Orleans quarterback, Blake, was hurt and lost when, on a sprint toward the sideline, he was tackled cleanly, almost gently, from behind.

Neither of the Saints’ injured stars was piled on or otherwise abused in that game.

Neither was a victim of unsportsmanlike conduct.

Both were victims of the game they love.

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THE FAVRE CASE: The unseen weapon that destroys more talented football players than any other one thing is a personal lack of tolerance for injury.

Some of those who in high school demonstrate NFL-class aptitude for the game, offensively or defensively, learn then or in college that they can’t handle the injuries that are built into football.

So they drop quietly out.

At the other end of the scale are those who, like Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre, quietly illustrate the almost inhuman tolerance for injury that the great players have.

You’ve seen Favre smashed around in game after game on play after play, taking the kind of punishment every week that would end the careers if not the lives of most of the sports fans who fantasize themselves as quarterbacks.

Yet Favre has started 136 consecutive NFL games, the all-time quarterback record.

More than that, just before he saw Indianapolis last Sunday, Favre cast away the crutches and cast off the cast that had protected his injured foot--for six painful days--and beat the Colts, 26-24.

That is tolerance.

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NEW WINNER: In New Orleans this season, Jim Haslett is proving something else, namely, that you can never tell about ANY new head coach.

There is nothing whatever in his record to suggest that Haslett, who was 7-3 before his quarterback was injured, would join Mike Martz of the Rams in the select handful of effective new NFL coaches--the most effective, possibly, since the arrival of Denver Coach Mike Shanahan some years back.

Maybe you weren’t surprised when Haslett, a lifelong defensive player and coach, converted the sad-sack Saints into an instant defensive power this year.

But everyone in the league had to have been surprised when Haslett’s backup quarterback--a virtual rookie named Aaron Brooks--played the Raiders to a standstill last week in another of Oakland quarterback Rich Gannon’s solid games of an MVP season.

Brooks, though without NFL experience, was Haslett’s handpicked backup this season--he saw something there that few others had--but when he moved in that afternoon to operate a deceptively smooth offense, the Saints were losing by 10 points, 10-0.

In the end, they lost by nine, 31-22.

Brooks led the Saints to three field goals and two touchdowns, throwing for both touchdowns--one a 53-yard bomb.

That tells you something about . . . the new quarterback?

No, the new coach.

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FORMER RAIDER: As NFL people said of an obscure lifelong assistant coach named Vince Lombardi when, at Green Bay in 1959, he launched the greatest coaching career in football history, one game doesn’t make a season, and one season doesn’t prove anything.

Haslett could yet fall on his face.

But somehow, I don’t think that will happen.

To watch Haslett at work is to see a coach who shows quite plainly that his act is together.

As for the Lombardi parallel, it’s a strange coincidence that Haslett’s pre-head coaching background is similar to that of the former Packer coach.

At the height of the Lombardi career in 1965, the NFL was still asking: Why didn’t the New York Giants promote him in the 1950s when he was on their coaching staff?

Today, the NFL is asking: Why didn’t the Saints promote Haslett in the 1990s when, for three years, they had him on their staff?

Or: Why didn’t Davis promote Haslett when he was a Los Angeles Raider assistant in 1994, the year the Raiders replaced Art Shell with Mike White?

Although one difference between them is that Lombardi was an offensive assistant whereas Haslett has always locked into defense, the truth is that Haslett coaches a brighter offense than Lombardi did.

That’s strange, too, although, for years, nobody could see Haslett as the CEO of an NFL ballclub.

This is a business that defies ANYONE to hire a winner.

And for awhile, you never know whether you’ve got one.

You never know about any new coach.

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TURNOVERS OVERRATED: More evidence that the average turnover is the most overrated aspect of the average football game--additional testimony that it’s the fall-guy play for the coach--was presented in Nashville last Sunday when the Tennessee Titans turned the ball over seven times, on three interceptions and four fumbles, and still overcame Cleveland easily, 24-10.

The result was reminiscent of the one in San Francisco in 1981 when the 49ers, with Joe Montana at quarterback, turned the ball over SIX times and still beat Dallas for the NFC title, 28-27, en route to their first of five Super Bowl championships.

In the Bay Area ever since, that 1981 49er-Cowboy game has been called, simply, “The Catch,” in honor of the winning touchdown pass.

Montana threw three interceptions that day, when he and his teammates also lost three fumbles, to prove that in football games, it isn’t turnovers that lose--or win--it’s what you do after the turnovers.

As a rule, the winners in close NFL games are those who, after a turnover, continue to attack with the smarter game plan and with the deeper desire to win.

Typically, it is coaches and their followers who talk the most about fumbles and interceptions.

A losing coach is aware of just what he means by a turnover.

What he desperately wants you to believe is, “I did everything right, but my players screwed up.”

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IT’S UP TO DILFER: Although the national consensus this week is that Tennessee, Oakland, St. Louis and Minnesota are the top NFL teams, my view is that the Baltimore Ravens are better balanced than any of them and hence the NFL’s best-balanced team--if not the best--whenever their new quarterback, Trent Dilfer, is distributing passes judiciously.

And that’s the rub.

Continuing an old habit, Dilfer has thrown two or three seemingly foolish interceptions in the last two weeks.

At the same time, his completions have been more accurately thrown, far and near, than those of most other 2000 passers, meaning that Dilfer has consistently overcome his mistakes--most recently in leading Baltimore past Dallas, 27-0, last week.

Baltimore Coach Brian Billick, whose won-lost record has risen to 8-4 during Dilfer’s three-game winning streak this month, obviously knows the man’s limitations, and has just as obviously been unable yet to make a full correction.

Billick, therefore, seems to be predicting that Dilfer will from now on throw more touchdown passes than interceptions and so keep Baltimore winning all winter -- as, most likely, a wild-card playoff team.

A continuously successful Dilfer would surprise the country’s large anti- Dilfer society but not necessarily the rest of the country.

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UNNECESSARY PICK: Dilfer’s worst interception as Baltimore’s new starter came in the Dallas game when he threw deep to a closely-covered wide receiver on a first-down play in the third quarter.

Earlier, he had hit the same receiver, Quadry Ismail, on a similar long pass when Ismail was similarly well guarded, but that one, fired on second and three, worked for a touchdown, apparently giving Dilfer some false confidence.

There didn’t seem much point in going back to the well, back to a well-blanketed Ismail deep, in the third quarter, on first and 10, at the Dallas 25--with two more downs on which to recover and sustain what would have been a 65-yard touchdown drive.

After reviewing that play, Billick obviously still believes that Dilfer’s satisfactory accuracy 90% to 95% of the time will atone for his bloopers--and he has the defense to help in the atonement.

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TOP VIKING? The Minnesota Vikings’ many fans keep wondering what’s most important about that club.

Who keeps the Vikings going so powerfully?

Is it wide receiver Randy Moss, as some critics insist?

Is it running back Robert Smith, of whom Coach Dennis Green was speaking the other day when he announced: “Our whole offense comes off Robert”?

Is it Green himself--a coach-of-the-year candidate?

I think it’s Daunte Culpepper, the 250-pound virtual rookie quarterback.

Culpepper’s passing, which dismantled Carolina last week, 31-17, is the key to the Minnesota offense for which coordinator Sherman Lewis gets an assist.

Of the NFL’s best teams, the Vikings, nonetheless, don’t have enough defense to win the Super Bowl.

Nor has Oakland, even in Gannon’s peak season.

Nor, apparently, have the Rams.

And it looks more and more every week as if Tennessee doesn’t have--or, rather, doesn’t seem to want to have--enough offense.

The Titans still figure, but Baltimore’s nicely balanced Ravens may steal it yet--if Dilfer doesn’t throw it away.