Welcome to the club, Daunte. You’re now in a somewhat elite company &045; Steve Bartkowski, Mike Lansford, Cliff Branch, Kevin Johnson, Flipper Anderson and Russell Erxleben.

You have crashed another New Orleans Saints victory celebration in an unconventional manner and given ESPN fodder for highlight footage in the process.

And the Saints found a new way to lose Sunday.

It was Culpepper who hit Randy Moss for a touchdown pass with 5 seconds left Sunday to cut the Saints’ lead to 31-30. Then, instead of kicking of PAT and going into overtime, the Vikings gambled.

Culpepper dropped the snap, picked it up and rumbled into the end zone to for the two-point conversion and the win.

It was another comeback, another game that slipped away and a new way for the Saints to lose a game.

But let’s be honest &045; had the NFL instituted the two-point conversion option in the 1960s, the Saints would have lost that way a handful of times by now.

Just when you thought you saw it all, something else happens to top it.

First it was Bartkowski and his Big Ben and Big Ben II, Branch and the Raiders eclipsing that 35-14 halftime deficit for the win, Lansford’s field goals, Johnson’s Hail Mary catch, Anderson’s 200-plus yards receiving on that Sunday night and Erxleben missing the snap that sailed out of the back of the end zone in overtime to give the Falcons the win.

Sick.

What constantly makes strange things happen to the Saints that gives their opponents life? Wasn’t that curse lifted from the Superdome before the playoff win two years ago?

A win would have sewn up the team’s sixth playoff spot.

Maybe folks saw something like this coming. After all, they were the Vikings, a team that despite being a dismal 3-10 has just owned the Saints since about the mid-1980s.

Several teams have beaten the Saints since then, but no one has slapped them around like the Vikings have. It started with the 44-10 plastering in the Saints’ first playoff game in franchise history in 1987, and the Vikings followed it up with a 45-3 thumping the following year.

The Vikings hammered the Saints in the 2000 playoffs and even kicked them around in the preseason the following season.

Each time the Saints failed to play solid defense, the culprit in Sunday’s debacle. The Saints did a poor job of tackling, pressuring the quarterback and defending the pass underneath.

While all is not lost, the Saints must stop this up-one-week-down-the-next pattern of late. What started as a storm of victories has turned into a weekly ritual of Sunday morning hangover: some Sundays you’re great, and others you still feel sick by suppertime.

But how in the world can this team contend for a playoff spot despite allowing 20 or more points in each of their 14 games this season?

Watch out. Here come the Cincinnati Bungles next week.

Hey, don’t hog the Alka-Selzer.

Adam Daigle

is the sports editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 445-3632 or by e-mail at

adam.daigle@natchezdemocrat.com.