Harper Wants Saints, Spagnuolo to Maintain Williams’ Intensity at BetLM

Harper Wants Saints, Spagnuolo to Maintain Williams’ Intensity

New Orleans (NFL/Newsfeed) — The 2012 sea­son shapes up as a cru­cible for the New Orleans Saints defense. Between the stigma of the league’s “bounty” find­ings and the loss of line­backer Jonathan Vilma (sus­pened for the entire sea­son) and defen­sive end Will Smith (sus­pended for the first four ganes), per­haps no NFL defense has ever gone into a sea­son with more of a chip on its col­lec­tive shoulder.

The man charged with ral­ly­ing the troops is Steve Spag­n­uolo, the for­mer St. Louis Rams coach and New York Giants coor­di­na­tor who led Big Blue’s defense to a Super Bowl vic­tory in 2007.

That resume, and Spagnuolo’s air of con­fi­dence, appear to be win­ning over the Saints’ vet­eran play­ers, accord­ing to The Times-Picayune.

“He speaks with so much con­fi­dence, you have noth­ing to do but believe in this guy and know he’s going to be great for us,” safety Roman Harper said. “He’s been a head coach in this league, had a lot of suc­cess as a defen­sive coor­di­na­tor, and you’ve got to respect this guy. I’m look­ing for­ward to work­ing with him more and more.”

The man the play­ers call “Spags” has a tough act to fol­low: His pre­de­ces­sor in the job, Gregg Williams, might have suf­fered incal­cu­la­ble dam­age to his rep­u­ta­tion — along with an indef­i­nite sus­pen­sion from the league — for his role in the “bounty” saga, but Williams still enjoys the fierce loy­alty of his for­mer players.

“You know, Gregg lit a fire that a lot of us aren’t going to let burn out. A sense of inten­sity,” Harper said. “And now we under­stand what it takes to win. Before I don’t think we under­stood it, and we didn’t have that com­plete feel­ing. But now we’ve been to the top of the moun­tain. We know what it takes to get there. And that’s what we’re try­ing to do now.

“It’s either Super Bowl or bust. And we won’t take any­thing less this year, no mat­ter what our cir­cum­stances are.”

Spag­n­uolo has a dif­fer­ent tac­ti­cal approach than Williams, who was famous for his indul­gence in blitzes. And he brings a dif­fer­ent lead­er­ship style as well.

“It’s a lot qui­eter,” safety Mal­colm Jenk­ins said. “And there’s a lot more teach­ing and other stuff going on. But Spags still has a way … there’s not a lot of curs­ing or any­thing like that, but he has a way of let­ting you know when he’s seri­ous and when he’s dis­ap­pointed. It gets across.”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more NFL news see: Harper wants Saints, Spag­n­uolo to main­tain Williams’ inten­sity.

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