Late in the third quarter of Sunday’s 48-17 win over the Atlanta Falcons, the New Orleans Saints’ production team decided to flash the scores happening around the NFL on the video board. This was right after a crucial fourth-and-goal stop by the New Orleans defense, and the Caesars Superdome crowd had come to life.
But as the scores cycled through, there was one game conspicuously absent: Tampa Bay at Carolina.
If the crew had shown the score, it would have revealed a disappointing result. The Buccaneers were winning.
In New Orleans’ season finale, the Saints found their offense but failed to find the help they needed to make the playoffs. New Orleans was eliminated from the NFC South when the Buccaneers clinched the division with a 9-0 win over the lowly Panthers. And the Saints were kept out of the final wild card spot in the NFC after the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears, hours after the Saints' game concluded.
It hardly mattered that quarterback Derek Carr arguably produced his finest outing of the season with a 264-yard, four-touchdown performance. Nor did it matter the Saints put up a season-high 48 points. Even the Saints’ controversial fake-kneel touchdown mattered little in the long run, no matter how upset Falcons coach Arthur Smith got.
The Saints (9-8) took care of business against the Falcons, but their playoff fate was left out of their hands.
The Saints did not win the NFC South, did not earn the seventh seed and instead missed the playoffs for a third straight year.
“I’m pleased with the way we finished the season,” Saints coach Dennis Allen said. “I’m not pleased with the way the record played out overall over a 17-game season. That’s not what we aspire to be, but I was proud of the way our guys continued to respond and continued to fight back.”
The stakes for Sunday’s game were clear for the Saints. To make the playoffs, they would need to beat the Falcons — and for either the Panthers to beat the Buccaneers, or for the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers to lose. The scenario involving the Panthers would mean the Saints would clinch the NFC South, while the other would have guaranteed the final wild-card spot.
Any possibility would have been meaningless without beating the Falcons. And to start, the Saints appeared to be in serious trouble in that regard.
The Falcons — starting Desmond Ridder over an injured Taylor Heinicke (ankle) — punished the Saints for defensive lapses early on. Atlanta came into the afternoon with only four pass plays of 50-plus yards this season, and yet against the Saints, the Falcons managed two on their first two drives.
Ridder connected on a wide-open 56-yard pass to Scotty Miller on the opening series, setting up a 15-yard touchdown to tight end Jonnu Smith. On Atlanta’s second drive, the Falcons again took advantage of a missed assignment when Saints cornerback Alontae Taylor mistimed his jump of a route and rookie Bijan Robinson took off from the flat for a 71-yard score.
But the Saints’ defensive errors didn’t cost them, and the Saints kept up with the Falcons thanks to some high-powered offense of their own.
Carr, the NFL’s most accurate quarterback over the back half of the season, spread the ball around to a variety of playmakers. He found A.T. Perry, Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed all for touchdowns to help New Orleans break open the game in the second half after the teams were tied at 17-17. Many of Carr’s throws demonstrated why the Saints were infatuated with acquiring him in the first place. The 32-year-old needled tight, contested throws that were on time and required near-perfect anticipation.
By the time he hit Perry for a 6-yard touchdown — the rookie’s second score of the game — to make it 41-17, Carr turned to the crowd, looked up to see his dad in the stands and spread his arms to yell, “Are you not entertained?” in the same vein of Russell Crowe’s character in “The Gladiator.”
The Saints hadn’t seen that version of Carr much to begin the year, but increasingly saw it over the final five games.
“It came together all at one time for us,” Carr said. “I’m really proud of that. We were, as a team, really focused on, ‘Yes, there was a chance we could have another home game after this,’ but if we didn’t, we wanted to give our fans something to let them know that we didn’t put all that hard work in for nothing.
Ridder, who had a perfect passer rating at halftime, was far from perfect in the second half. The second-year quarterback reverted to the bad habits that cost him his starting job in the first place. In the third quarter, Ridder threw an interception right to Taylor. That paved the way for Carr to hit Olave for the go-ahead touchdown.
The Saints never lost the lead after that, and Atlanta waved the white flag with more than six minutes left when Ridder was replaced by third-stringer Logan Woodside. He fared no better, throwing an interception to safety Tyrann Mathieu with 1:10 left.
Mathieu’s 74-yard return fell just short of the end zone, which set up the most controversial moment of the afternoon. Although the Saints trotted out Jameis Winston to take a knee from the victory formation, the players overruled offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael’s call to give Jamaal Williams a shot to score his first touchdown of the year instead.
Smith and Allen both were furious. The Falcons coach refused to shake Allen’s hand after the game and instead tore into him for the decision. Allen apologized publicly for the score, and said it wasn’t “acceptable.”
But after tensions simmered, the Saints were left with the same scenario they entered the afternoon with. They were unsure whether they would make the postseason and went home to see their fate decided by other teams.
It was a situation that could have been entirely avoided if they had taken care of business earlier in the season.
But now, New Orleans' season won't continue.
“It’s hard to not go back and think about some of the games we lost,” tight end Taysom Hill said. “And be in the situation where you don’t control your own situation, you start thinking about ... ‘Man, we needed one more to win the division.’
“We can’t dwell on that stuff. ... That’s a tough thing to do.”
