I watched the coaches film of the Lions game and felt some mixed emotions after going through all of the plays. First and foremost, the offensive line has to play much better than what they showed against the Lions given the investment the Saints have made through either draft capital or contractually. The right side in particular was a big reason why the offense struggled to get off to a good start against the Lions as they could neither open lanes in the running game or give Tyler Shough consistent time to throw. Cesar Ruiz was entering the year needing to have a bounce back campaign after how his 2025 season went and his performance against the Lions was not a good start to accomplishing his goal. Taliese Fuaga has been a mixed bag thus far in his young career which is not abnormal for young offensive tackles. Tali had a promising rookie season but followed it up with an up and down sophomore season where he dealt with multiple injuries over the course of the season. He is someone the Saints will have to make a decision on regarding picking up his fifth year option after the season and someone who the Saints need to play well in order to accomplish their goals this season. But I have to give the offense credit because the last 20 or so minutes of the game was fun to watch. Shough was in rhythm from then on and made big time throw after big time throw getting multiple receivers involved. Although as I was watching the game live I could not help but notice it took way too long to get Juwan Johnson on the board. Juwan has had a track record of performances like this before and you would like to see better consistent production from him rather than the all or nothing types of games he has had in the past. I will be curious to see if he gets involved in the passing game much sooner against the Ravens this week which could very well help the offense get off to a better start. Moving on to who I thought was the player of the game, Chris Olave. Olave took a little while to get going in conjunction with the offense but he ultimately did exactly what I thought he would do against Detroit, dominate. Olave took advantage of the Lion’s defensive backs all game long and with their starting safeties being injured Olave beat Detroit down the field for long gains multiple times. If Olave has enough games like this one against the Lions he could very well be in the offensive player of the year conversation when it is all said and done. The only obstacles I could see is his health and if his number of targets drops when Jordyn Tyson returns from his injury. Moving on to the defense, as a whole I thought the defense did a great job against the Lions. Holding them to seven points in the first half was great and even though the scoreboard showed they gave up thirty one points, fourteen of those came from short fields because of turnovers on offense. There was a lot of encouraging play across the defense, Jonas Sanker looked great in the star role and made some impact plays, whether they counted or not. On that note the duel between Chase Young and Penei Sewell did not disappoint as both had their moments throughout the game, with the biggest being Young’s strip sack that was not meant to be according to the officials. All I will say is even after the explanation there is just no way the officials called either Young’s play or all the other strip sacks across the league this weekend correct. Moving on, I would have liked to see Chase Young get more snaps on the opposite edge in what would have been a more favorable matchup for him against the Lions rookie offensive tackle. But not only for the matchup but also just to give the offense a different look so they do not just expect him in the same spot all game long. Speaking of aligning in different spots I thought Brandon Staley did a great job of moving Kaden Elliss around who then to his credit was able to take advantage and have a good game. However, an area of concern did rear its ugly head in this game which did not come as a surprise. The defensive line did not do a nearly good enough job stopping the run against the Lions. The Saints used a rotation of players along the defensive line throughout the game to try and keep players fresh which is a philosophy I believe in but with some older veterans in the mix I believe it would be in the Saints best interest moving forward to limit their snaps in favor of players like Vernon Broughton and Christen Miller. Vernon and Christen’s development would help raise the ceiling of the defense and improve the long term outlook on the defensive side of the ball. I expect the Saints to use more resources to shore up the defensive line when we get to the offseason but in the meantime the Saints will have to figure out how to get the best out of who they have on the roster. Overall I am concerned about the slow starts, the Saints and Kellen Moore have had enough of them now to where it is starting to look like a legitimate issue moving forward. If the Saints are to improve their chances against the best teams in the league they will have to be more productive early on in those games. I believe the slow starts can be fixed by Kellen Moore and the offense but I am not so sure the Saints have the answer to playing the run better on defense currently. But with those concerns I saw plenty of positives like Jonas Sanker settling in nicely to the Star role, Kaden Elliss being a versatile piece for the defense, Chase Young having a great battle with Penei Sewell, Shough and Olave connecting time after time on key plays. There is plenty for the Saints to improve on but after watching the tape they appear to be starting from a much better spot this season than in season’s past.

We’re a couple weeks into the college football season and here are some players I have been keeping an eye on as well as some buzz I have been hearing but have not yet watched. The list will have both draft eligible players and non draft eligible players who have been making a name for themselves thus far in the season. Malachi Toney - WR - Miami Malachi Toney burst onto the scene as a freshman last year with a 109 reception, 1,211 yard, 10 TD campaign and he has continued his dominance into his sophomore season. He is currently third in receiving yards in the country with 330 yards. Toney has been a human highlight reel with his route running, shaking defenders with ease leading to massive separation from those trying to cover him. He’s been a fun watch and if you are not watching Miami games you will most likely see a highlight of his going viral on social media as you are scrolling through your feed. Jadan Baugh - RB - Florida Jaden Baugh is a grown man when he runs the ball and should not be as graceful as he is given his 6 '1 225 pound frame. Baugh has gotten off to an absurd start to the season by rushing for 296 yards on just 28 carries resulting in a yards per carry over ten as well as finding the end zone five times. Baugh has been popping up on my feed with long runs featuring great cut backs and jump cuts to weave through defenders. Baugh was on my list for top running back prospects entering the season and has backed it up thus far. Kamario Taylor - QB - Mississippi State Kamario Taylor is a sophomore who has been seeing increasing buzz with each week. Taylor has been creating some intriguing highlights due to some of the best, new arm strength being shown at the QB position in college. The velocity he can throw with is at an elite level which forces evaluators to pay attention. But his arm strength is not the only trait to be excited about, Taylor has a 6’4 230 pound frame paired with a good ability to run the ball as well. He is someone to keep an eye on as Taylor has all the physical tools to succeed long term. Princewill Umanmielin - Edge - LSU Princewill is a senior, the younger brother of Panthers edge rusher Princely Umanmielen, and looks to be the next member of the family tree heading towards a career in the NFL. Princewill has the build of a long, lean, relentless edge rusher who can win his matchup in a variety of ways including speed around the corner, a spin move, the arm over, etc. He is currently leading college football in sacks with five on the season. Leading the country in sacks while playing in the SEC is quite an accomplishment and we’ll see if he can keep his pace as LSU enters conference play against Ole Miss this weekend. Kingston Lopa - DB - Cal Cal has been quietly producing some NFL caliber defensive backs the past couple of years such as Nohl Williams, and Hezekiah Masses. Sophomore Kingston Lopa is quickly making a case to be the next in line. Lopa’s physical attributes for the position is an outlier as he is listed at 6’5 210 pounds. But he is not just a physical presence on the field, he is showing he has the ball skills and a knack for finding the ball. Kopa currently leads college football in interceptions with four on the year already. A defensive back with the size and ball skills he possesses will be a no brainer for evaluators as someone to keep an eye on. Lamont Lester Jr. - Edge - Colorado Lamont is listed 6’2 230 pounds so he is on the smaller side for an NFL edge rusher but he is showing some good athleticism, motor, and active hands in the early parts of the season. He picked up three sacks against Georgia Tech and won with speed around an offensive tackle, finishing a pressure his teammate created, then with active hands to shoot inside for his last sack. With his skillset Lester will be someone worth keeping an eye on throughout the season as someone who could potentially make an impact at the next level. Drew Mestemaker - QB - Oklahoma State Drew has been on my radar since last season as he was part of the PFF darling trio at North Texas last season. Mestemaker has good size for the position being listed at 6’3 215 pounds. He got off to a rough start against Tulsa in week one but turned it around in week two by pulling off what many see as the upset of the week by beating the sixth ranked Oregon Ducks. Drew was able to outduel another big QB prospect in Dante Moore by making some big time throws throughout the game and orchestrating scoring drive after scoring drive against a talented Oregon defense. While there is a chance he comes out for the draft this season he is presumed to be more in the 2028 conversation. Regardless of his draft status, Drew and Oklahoma State could be a fun team to follow this season.

The first thing that hits you when the hat goes on is the quiet. Not silence. The regulator still carries the hiss of air and the inevitable inhale and exhale of each breath, but a kind of pressure-quiet the rest of the world never gets. I don’t know how to explain it, except that it is almost as if the ocean is talking to you, in a way that is unbelievably relaxing and nerve-racking at the same time. One minute you are standing on a steel deck in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, thinking about the task at hand while the sun hammers you and the tenders. The next, you are descending the downline, dropping through the water like a rock until you hit bottom and reach the work site. Ohio to Houston I did not grow up in these waters, nor did I ever think I would grow up to become a commercial diver. I came from Ohio, a state rich in farmland, not oceanic coast. About twenty days after I graduated from Margaretta High School in Castalia, I packed what I had and moved to Houston. That was the whole plan: get to Texas, get into dive school, and get in the water. It sounded easy. Well, you know what they say. I enrolled at The Ocean Corporation. The tanks. The chamber. The welding bays. The zero-visibility drills. The long days that are supposed to feel like the job before the job ever starts. Ocean Corp has been turning out commercial divers since 1969. I was just another kid on the roster trying not to wash out. About ten percent of an incoming class lasts until the end. We started with thirty-four eager students. The numbers dwindled quickly. By the end we had a class of ten, one of the larger graduating groups. After dive school, only about one percent of a class typically lasts the first year in the field. I believe that out of my class, only two of us are still diving, including myself. Eight short months and perfect attendance later, I hired on with Epic Divers and Marine as an eighteen-year-old in Harvey, Louisiana. Eighteen That is the part people always stop on. Eighteen. Fresh out of school. A Louisiana diving company putting a kid on the deck and, soon enough, in the water. Epic did not take me the first time I interviewed, probably the age, and the fact that it was my first real job. It took about a month. I kept calling the operations manager and leaving voicemails. Finally he answered, and I told him I was ready to work, that I had an apartment in Harvey five minutes away, and that I could start tomorrow. It actually worked. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The next day, it all started. Epic was a Gulf outfit then, based in Harvey: a full-service commercial diving and marine-support company, the kind that lives on platform work, pipelines, inspections, and whatever the field throws at you next. I was not a veteran. I was a red-hat tender, a rookie, who wanted the dive hat and the water time. You Do Not Get the Hat First You get the deck. You learn the gear until you can assemble it half-asleep. You figure-eight and tend the umbilical. You flake the jet hose. You work the hydraulics up and down. You give the infamous repeat-back to the supervisor: retrieval line on bottom. You run the chamber and try not to bend anyone. You fetch coffee. You listen. You learn like a sponge. The Gulf is a hard and hot teacher. Visibility is trash sometimes. The weather turns. Schedules do not exist in any way a regular person would recognize. You work twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week when you are out. You lose track of the calendar. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Before you know it, you have spent two hundred seventy days or more offshore. There are no windows on a lot of the dive-support vessels. You might get woken at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m. The industry wants someone in the water around the clock, or whenever it is most convenient for the job. As I said before, nine out of ten people who go through dive school do not last a year. That is not a scare line. That is the number. The ones who stay are the ones who can laugh through the stupidity of the day, stay useful when they are exhausted, and not let the job break them. “It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish.” A very wise man once told me that. It stuck in my head on my first hitch offshore, when I was ready to quit because I sucked so badly and the work was long and hard. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades and still do one thing perfectly, or several things perfectly, when it counts, and get shit done. And when you are not perfect, and I mean perfect, you get an earful of how stupid and shitty you are as a diver. But the next dive is like a new day. Redemption. There is an old saying in this trade: you are only as good as your last dive. I try to live by that saying in everything I do now. What the Work Actually Is People always ask what a commercial diver actually does. The short answer is whatever the oil field needs done that a machine still cannot do reliably. Platform inspections. Pipeline repairs. Burning steel underwater with an exothermic torch that throws ten-thousand-degree heat and hydrogen gas in water that can explode on you if it is not vented correctly. Cutting. Cleaning. Installing. Inspecting. Abandoning. Some days you are a mechanic. Some days you are a rigger. Some days you are just the person they send down because something broke at one hundred eighty feet and the clock is running on a vessel that costs tens of thousands of dollars a day to sit there. Most days in the Gulf you work by feel. Zero visibility. Your hands become your eyes. You count bolts by touch. You burn a straight line by drag and feel. You know when the current is trying to walk you off the structure because your umbilical starts to pull the wrong way. You learn the jacket legs and the layout, the HDs and VDs, the clamp, the flange, the cut. You learn that the tender on the other end of the hose is not a helper. He is the reason you come back up. Money, Risk, and Coming Home The money can be good when the work is there: overtime, depth pay, long hitches. It can stack up quickly. It can also disappear when a weather window closes or a project gets delayed or canceled. You live with that uncertainty. You live with the knowledge that the job is inherently dangerous, and that the people who talk the most about danger are usually the ones who have not been in it long enough. The veterans talk about procedures, about the man on the hose, about not getting sloppy on the last dive of a long hitch, or about how they got really fucked up at a diver bar once and probably started a fight or two. Coming home is its own kind of shock after a long hitch. You step off the boat in Fourchon or Houma, drive toward the city, and the world is suddenly loud again. Heat. Food. Traffic. People who have no idea what a decompression table is. The contrast is almost funny. One week you are living in a steel box with the same crew, eating the same meals, thinking in depths and bottom time. The next you are sitting at a table onshore and someone is talking about the weather like it is an inconvenience instead of a work stoppage. I do not romanticize it. The job takes pieces of you if you let it. Relationships onshore have to survive long stretches of absence. Your body keeps a ledger: joints, ears, the way cold water never quite leaves your bones. You learn to respect the tables and the chamber because the bends do not care that you were eighteen when they first put you to work. The Part I Keep But there is something down there I have never found anywhere else. When the work is going right and the hat is quiet and your hands know the steel, the rest of it falls away. No crowd. No noise from the city. Just the job, the air in the hose, and the knowledge that the only person who can finish this particular piece of work is you. That is the part I keep. Not the danger stories. Not the paycheck. The part where an Ohio kid who moved to Houston twenty days after graduation ends up thirty or a hundred and eighty feet down off Louisiana and then reaches the surface again, with the work done and the hat still in good hands. For a little while, that is enough. Make sure to follow Patrick Harkness on X

Roster Reality: What Do the Pelicans Actually Have?

Week 2 Recap: LA Tech @ LSU

I watched K-State last 2 games here is what they do well. Kansas State is 2-0 under first-year head coach Collin Klein after a 71-3 opener against Nicholls and a 34-7 win over Washington State. The offense has been productive and physical, averaging 52.5 points and 523 yards per game. Dominant rushing attack: This has been the clearest strength. The Wildcats have rushed for 607 yards on 84 carries (7.2 yards per carry) with 7 rushing touchdowns. • Rodney Fields Jr. (Oklahoma State transfer) leads the way: 206 yards and 2 TDs, including a 75-yard scoring run to open the second half against Washington State. He also had 101 yards and a score in the opener. • Depth behind him is real. Joe Jackson, Jay Harris, and Monterrio Elston Jr. have all scored rushing TDs. Avery Johnson himself has 101 rushing yards and a score. • They generated 312 rushing yards vs. Nicholls and 295 vs. Washington State (7.4 ypc in that game). Six different players scored on the ground against Nicholls. The offensive line has created consistent push and lanes. Klein noted after Week 1 that the first-team unit had no missed assignments and kept Johnson clean. Efficient, complementary passing Avery Johnson has been accurate and productive: 37-of-55 (67.3%), 391 yards, 6 passing TDs, and 2 interceptions. He added a rushing TD in the opener. The two picks were really bad, stared down the WR and the CB Jaylen Thomas for Wash State jumped the route and picked him off twice (1-TD). • Against Nicholls he was 15-of-21 for 199 yards and 3 TDs before coming out early. • Against Washington State he was 22-of-34 for 192 yards and 3 TDs (plus 78 rushing yards). The two interceptions were the main blemish; one was returned for Washington State’s only score. • Josh Manning (Missouri transfer) has emerged as the top target: 13 catches, 130 yards, 2 TDs. He had a career-high 10 receptions for 97 yards and a score against Washington State and has been reliable on third downs with good YAC. Joe Jackson has also been a dual-threat weapon (receiving TDs in both games). Efficiency and scheme: • Third-down conversion: 19-of-27 (70%) through two games. • They’ve been balanced and physical rather than one-dimensional. Klein’s offense emphasizes run game and play-action, with Johnson comfortable in the pocket when protected. • Time of possession and first-down production have been strong (58 first downs in two games). Context: Both opponents have been limited. Nicholls is FCS and Washington State’s offense has been poor (166 total yards against K-State). The Wildcats still have some finishing issues Johnson himself pointed out after the Washington State game, they left points on the field and didn’t always put the opponent away as cleanly as they wanted. The rushing game, offensive line, and Johnson-to-Manning connection look like the things that have traveled well through two weeks. Those will be the areas Tulane has to slow down this Saturday in Manhattan. #RollWave Make sure to follow Patrick Harkness on X

It means Kadin Semonza is no longer the backup who waited. He is the quarterback who won the game. Saturday was his first start at Tulane after transferring from Ball State in January 2025, sitting behind Jake Retzlaff last year, then losing the August camp battle to Zeon Chriss-Gremillion. He came in at halftime of the Duke loss. Five days later Will Hall named him the starter. Against South Alabama he went the distance, 14-of-22 for 212 yards, one touchdown, zero picks and the throw that decided a 28-24 win. That last ball is the whole story. Down three with 1:22 left, third down at the South Alabama 14, the play was a run read. Semonza saw the look, threw it anyway, and dropped a back-shoulder fade to Destyn Hill in the corner. Hill held it. 28-24, 1:17 left. Defense gets the stop. Victory formation. That is not a caretaker quarterback. That is a starter taking the play off-script because the game asked for it. Hall’s postgame line was the endorsement: “Yeah, he’s a quarterback, man.” What changed for him: He had already proven he could produce. MAC Freshman of the Year at Ball State in 2024: 2,904 yards, 25 touchdowns. What he had not proven in New Orleans was that he could close. Saturday he did it on the first chance he was given for four quarters. The winning drive was clean: option pitch to Jaylin Lucas, 13 yards to Garrett Mmahat on third-and-1, 36 yards down the sideline to his brother Cash, then the fade to Hill. Three-for-three, 63 yards, no panic. Pocket presence was better than it was at Duke. The ball came out on time. He did not hunt hero ball until the play actually required it. That matters because the job was never just about arm talent. Hall needed someone who would not flinch after a 17-3 opener and a midweek quarterback change. Semonza’s own words after getting the start were that he prepares like a starter because he knows in his heart that is what he is. The South Alabama tape is the first public proof. Kansas State is next: The offense still lived on explosives instead of chains. Thirteen first downs is not a starter’s weekly standard. The defense is a problem he cannot throw his way out of every week. AIE: He stayed, practiced, took the half at Duke, and then made the throw when Hall handed him the keys. That path, waiting, then delivering is now part of how this staff will talk about him. The real takeaway: For Semonza, this win is identity. Not “the guy who replaced Zeon.” The guy who took a run call and threw the winner anyway. Long, hard journey, first start, first win of the Will Hall era, local receivers and a 214-yard back making it possible and the quarterback finishing it. That is what he has been chasing since Mission Viejo. Saturday he finally got to play the last snap as the starter, and the last snap was the one that counted. #RollWave Make sure to follow Patrick Harkness on X