I've had some time now to cool down and rethink my feelings about the Dan Morgan situation. He gets to flip-flop between playing football and being retired so why shouldn't I have the same right? This realization came to me while I was enjoying my House Pad Thai at Bangkok Thai Restaurant and here it is:You can't lose something you never had in the first place.
The Saints never had Dan Morgan. They aren't losing any production from last year. Bringing in Morgan was the equivalent of putting it all on black with the money you just won over at the craps table. It could only have been a plus.
I'm not claiming to be profound here. When I came home, I discovered that Mickey Loomis and I think alike. It's exactly what Loomis alluded to when he commented yesterday...
"I wouldn't call it a loss. A loss is when you plan to have to have something in place and it doesn't happen. That's a loss. Our thinking all along was that if he could come back and play at anywhere close to the level that he had played like in the past, that would be a bonus. It would have been a bonus if he had been able to recapture his past."
"We’re not out anything, we just didn’t gain anything."
Judging by the rest of his and Paytons comments, Morgan's retirement seems as much a surprise to them as it was to all of us. In fact, they may even have learned of the news the same manner in which we did - Twitter. Do I think it sucks? Yes. Does it make the earlier loss of Stanley Arnoux that much worse? Also yes. Do the circumstances surrounding the situation seem odd? A bit. Do I enjoy answering my own questions? Apparently.
I hope everything is alright with Dan Morgan and there aren't any deeper issues at play that we don't know about. I also wish him the best of luck in the future. But this loss doesn't hurt the Saints at all. And remember what we just learned from minicamp this weekend about the Saints completely revamped defense; If we really are going to believe that this is a completely different defense under Gregg Williams then shouldn't a lot of the improvement come by getting more out of the players the Saints already have like Shanle, Mitchell, Dunbar et al?