Saints, LSU seasons eerily similar to 2011

It’s crazy.

The Saints finish off a 13-3 regular season, yet end up the No. 3 seed in the NFC playoffs while Green Bay and San Francisco claim the conference’s first-round byes.

LSU has a chance to cap an undefeated season by winning a national championship in New Orleans.

That was exactly the script as the calendar turned from 2011 to 2012. And it’s the same script about to play out over the next 14 days.

Since the NFL expanded to a 12-team playoff in 1990, the 2011 Saints became only the second team to win 13 games and fail to earn a bye. It hasn’t happened since – until now, that is.

The slight difference this time around is the order of the seeds in front of them. Green Bay was the top seed in 2011 after a 15-1 regular season. San Francisco was seeded second with an identical 13-3 record to New Orleans, but claimed the tiebreaker advantage on conference record – exactly what happened this year with the Packers.

On the college front, the format has changed from the BCS era in 2011 to the College Football Playoff in 2019 – many say because SEC West rivals LSU and Alabama faced off in that championship game.

Though the format is different, the final destination is the same – the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. And just like eight years ago, the home-state Tigers are in the title game, this time against a Clemson team that hasn’t lost since its last trip to the Dome two years ago this week.

Of course, it was not a good night for LSU on Jan. 9, 2012, when Alabama did not allow the Tigers offense to cross midfield in a 21-0 whitewashing. Les Miles’ offense gained just 92 yards that night, or about 600 less than the suddenly high-powered Tiger attack gained in Saturday’s Peach Bowl semifinal 63-28 win over Oklahoma.

Five days later, the Saints – after rolling past Detroit 45-28 in the Wild Card round – lost in the final nine seconds of a topsy-turvy fourth quarter in San Francisco, 36-32.

In January 2017, on the fifth anniversary of the LSU-Alabama championship game, we recalled what a gut-punch of a six-day stretch area fans suffered, and the lingering effects of it.

Consider what we wrote three years ago: “LSU starts 2017 with a new head coach in Ed Orgeron. The Saints will begin 2017 with effectively a whole new coaching staff after last week’s ‘parting of ways’ with long-time staffers Joe Vitt, Greg McMahon and Bill Johnson – who, ironically, replaced Orgeron after the 2008 season.”

(Now, in another interesting twist, McMahon and Johnson are now on Orgeron’s LSU staff.)

“Just as the fortunes reversed negatively five years ago this week,” we continued, “the hope remains they can reverse back in the other direction.”

Perhaps the first few weeks of 2020 is time to complete that reversal.