METAIRIE, La. – Heath Evans walked through the locker room Wednesday with a slight limp, a wrap covering his left knee.
But it’s not the knee that bothers him so much this week.
Not with the Patriots, his old team, coming to town. Not with coaches and friends making the post-Thanksgiving trip to play the Saints on Monday Night Football in the Superdome.
“I love those coaches,” Evans said. “I love Mr. and Mrs. Kraft. I love that organization. Any time you get a chance to play against your buddies, it’s no different than going in the back yard and wanting to play football.”
And this year more than any other, the game between New Orleans and New England has meaning. The Patriots (7-3) are the only team to go through a 16-game regular season undefeated. The Saints are 10-0 and trying to get to that point.
Evans knows just how hard it is to get to there. He remembers the season like it was yesterday.
“We’re all prideful, arrogant men,” Evans said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be at this level. We want to win because it’s this week and it’s this team. ’07 was a fun year. It had its challenges.”
But not many.
The 2007 New England team is one of the best teams ever, if not the best, with all apologies to the 1972 undefeated Miami team.
Through 10 games of that season, New England was averaging 41.1 points per game and was winning by 25.4 points. A 24-20 win over Indianapolis was the only game decided by fewer than 17 points in the first 10 weeks for the Patriots.
By week 16, the Patriots hadn’t scored fewer than 20 points as quarterback Tom Brady threw for 50 touchdowns, an NFL record. Of those, Randy Moss had 23 touchdown catches, an NFL record. That Patriots team scored an NFL record 589 points. The 75 touchdowns scored – also an NFL record.
“They played complementary game: offense, defense, special teams,” Saints right tackle Jon Stinchcomb remembered, “something I’m sure across the league a lot of teams have tried to model themselves after. They found ways to win. Sometimes they were blowouts and sometimes they were scratching, but that’s what good teams do. They found ways to win.”
Two years later, comparisons are beginning to surface between those Patriots and this year’s Saints. New Orleans leads the league in scoring with 369 points, good for 36.9 points per game. New Orleans is leading the league in total offense at 420.5 yards per game. And the Saints are winning by 16.5 points per game.
But they caution to not put the cart before the proverbial horse. There are still six games to go, including Monday’s showdown with the only team to make it through 16 games unscathed.
“I think there are a lot of similarities, but with that said, they were able to do it for an entire season,” Stinchcomb said. “We’re just a couple of games past halfway. I think to even consider throwing our names into that hat, we’ve got a few more games to go.”
Added Evans, “The last couple of weeks of that ‘07 year were tough. Teddy Bruschi said it. Rodney Harrison said it the last couple of weeks. We’re so far away from that point. People say, ‘Oh, it’s only four or five wins.’ There are teams that can’t get that many wins in two seasons.”
Still, even this Saints team is remembering just how impressive those Patriots were.
Consistently, players talked about how New England answered the bell time after time despite playing against teams who gave their A-game against the Patriots.
“Everybody wanted to knock them off,” Saints running back Reggie Bush said. “Everybody wanted to be the team that beat them. I’m sure it was tough for them, but just watching it, it was kind of magical just to see everything they were doing.”
