Saints “hard hat” defense shines against the Bucs

The sole purpose of a clock is to keep time. Its habitual tick and daunting hands serve as a constant backbone to our daily schedules and routines. 

For various reasons, people will sometimes set their clocks to an inaccurate time on purpose. Legendary Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi famously believed that if his players didn’t show up to team meetings 15 minutes early, they were considered late. 

The clock at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field is set 15 minutes ahead of time to honor this rule.

However, clocks are, for the most part, pointless unless set to the accurate time. The branches of the United States military are sticklers for time, and soldiers set their watches to what is known as International Atomic Time (TAI). This is a high-precision time based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth’s geoid.

Don’t ask me what a geoid is. I don’t know.

I do know that TAI is available to the layperson at timeanddate.com/worldclock for those that want the second-most precise time available to humans.

If you would like the most precise time known to humans, set your watches to stupid and log on to Skip Bayless’s Twitter account. His tweets provide content on almost a second-by-second basis.

On October 25th, 2021, Bayless sent a tweet insinuating that the Saints star linebacker Demario Davis’s comments about New Orleans’s “hard hat” defense wouldn’t be much to brag about after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers came to town.

The Saints defeated the Bucs 36-27, and the game was sealed by PJ Williams’s pick six late in the fourth quarter.

So much for that “hard hat” defense being a fluke.

This was after New Orleans starting quarterback Jameis Winston went down early in the first quarter with what we now know is a season-ending ACL injury, and backup quarterback Trevor Siemian had to take the reins.

The last full season that Siemian played was 2017 when he started 10 games for the Denver Broncos and appeared in 11. Besides that, he played one game for the New York Jets in 2019.

Siemian’s final line against Tampa Bay was 16-29 with 159 passing yards and one touchdown.

It will be interesting to see what the Saints decide to do to fill Winston’s void, as the progress he was making in coach Sean Payton’s offense was clear. Taysom Hill will be the obvious option, but Siemian has generated buzz thanks to his ability to execute in crunch time during a pivotal division game.

While I am not sold on either Hill or Siemian’s ability to be a long-term solution for New Orleans’s signal caller, it’s hard to count this team out of anything at this point.

Payton is, for the most part, a great offensive play caller and, as a team, the Saints showed an impressive level of grit throughout the season.

Running back Mark Ingram’s return to the team has also injected an amount of energy and fun that, in my opinion, that franchise had been lacking in the last few years.

Fans in the Superdome responded accordingly, and it was great to see such an electric atmosphere in that building again.

Will New Orleans make the playoffs with such a question mark at the quarterback position? That’s tough to say, but the defense has certainly proven to be of championship caliber.

With 10 games left in the NFL season, there is still plenty of time for the offense of the 5-2 Saints to find themselves.

Regardless of how this team finishes, they will almost certainly make the city of New Orleans and the fan base proud with their competitive play.

You can set your watch to that too.