Keyshawn Johnson: The Saints Will Win the Super Bowl

With the NFL season kicking off tonight every pundit with screentime is scrambling to fire off their biggest and boldest big-picture take for the season. Look no further than Bill Simmons telling Peter Schrager yesterday that the Pittsburgh Steelers would end up as the top seed in the AFC and that the Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Ravens, Los Angeles Chargers, and New York Jets would all miss the playoffs entirely. It seems Keyshawn Johnson saw that and wanted to one-up Simmons with a prediction for the opposite conference to get the people going.

And he sure did! I'm not sure about getting all the people going but it got some people going for sure. Me included. On Undisupted this morning Johnson made the argument that people should believe in the New Orleans Saints more before picking them to win the Super Bowl. This year!

The reasoning... well, there isn't much. The crux of the argument is that the NFC South is bad enough that the Saints could end up with homefield advantage in the playoffs (even if they are not actually one of the best teams in the NFL) and then once you get there anything can happen. The middle three minutes of the video are mostly spent explaining why Derek Carr isn't actually that bad because he had to fight through a lot of bad coaching and outside noise while with the Raiders in both Oakland and Las Vegas.

While the Carr stuff is in the eye of the beholder a quick look at New Orleans' schedule suggests a high playoff seed is not necessarily out of the question. They get to play the AFC South, which features two nearly-guaranteed bottom-feeders and the Titans, along with the NFC South. The best QB they face all season could very well end up being Kirk Cousins. It's not as ridiculous as it might seem to believe the Saints could have one of the best records in the conference come season's end.

It's just a step too far to believe them capable of making a championship run after that. If they do end up with a high seed it would be an empty-calorie record thanks to a schedule that boasts four games against opponents that made the playoffs last year (two if you take away the Tampa Bay Buccaneers matchups). Much like last year's Minnesota Vikings nobody would take them seriously as title contenders and they'd probably lose in embarrassing fashion at the first opportunity.

Points to Johnson for cooking up something unique here but it would be astounding if he was right.