You either have the sauce or you don’t.
Alvin Kamara does.
Watch him on that 52-yard touchdown catch last week against the Green Bay Packers. He was like water finding a crack in a seal. It was fluid, creative brilliance. Even when he hit the higher gears, he didn’t look like he was trying hard. He glided. He weaved around defenders, hopped over them, bounced off them all in one play.
He beat the first guy to the outside, instinctively working his way back to the ball to make himself a moving target, and then taa-daa.
“The next thing you know, magic happened,” Saints receiver Tre’Quan Smith said.
“He’s a special talent, generational talent,” said Saints left tackle Terron Armstead, before really hammering the supernatural thing home. “He’s Black Panther-like.”
Saints coach Sean Payton has a word for this, too, when players do the thing Kamara did and rampage through a whole host of defenders, like they’re operating on some sort of different plane.
That’s the sauce. Specifically, that’s the spaghetti sauce. Allow running backs coach Joel Thomas to explain.
“You put the spaghetti sauce on something that doesn’t taste too good, it brings the flavor back out and makes it feel alright,” Thomas said.
Kamara’s spaghetti sauce recipe is the type of stuff that makes Thomas sometimes forget he is a professional football coach on the sidelines. He caught himself turning into a fan during that long Kamara touchdown, jumping up and down on the sidelines and yelling Go! At one point when Kamara was sluicing through the Green Bay defense, Thomas caught himself saying, “That was unbelievable.”
And then he’s back on the sidelines, where he’s been with Kamara the past three-plus seasons, and he reminds himself that this is not unbelievable, because he’s seen it play out so many times before. This is just the sauce making everything else taste good, and Kamara is overflowing right now.
Look, Kamara doesn’t want to make a brash told-you-so statement to those who may have doubted him after his injury-marred 2019 season. His play through three weeks is statement enough. Nor does Kamara feel the need to prove anything to himself or anybody else.
“If you know, you know,” Kamara said. “And if you’re talking and doubting, then that’s up to you. I was just focused on what I had to do to get back and healthy and help my team. And I’m still trying to do that.”
The numbers, those are an exclamation point. He is leading the NFL in both scrimmage yards (438) and touchdowns (6). Combine all the tackles broken by division rivals Tampa Bay (5) and Atlanta (4), according to Pro Football Reference, and it’s still not as many as the 13 Kamara has broken by himself. He has as many catches in the first three weeks (27) as the entire Saints receiver corps combined.
But this has never been a matter of statistical volume. He still put together impressive numbers in 2019 while playing on one leg and missing two games. No, it’s about the exhilarating plays that turn his own coaches into unwitting fans on the sidelines.
That was what Kamara felt missing in his game from a year ago when he was playing through a knee injury. It is a feeling he chased, and appeared to find, this offseason.
“I’m back in rhythm,” Kamara said. “Obviously, last year — we’ve talked about it — I was injured. A lot of those things that I normally do, I couldn’t do. Couldn’t really move how I wanted to, couldn’t be as physical as I wanted to be.
“So now that I’m healthy, I’m just kind of returning back to my normal self and feeling good.”
Included in that is an evident joie de vivre — the iced-out smile and exuberant celebrations are as prevalent as the big plays, perhaps because they’re connected. That was absent for portions of last season, when Kamara was faced with questions about his body language as he was fighting the injury.
He saw and became irritated with the online chatter that he was upset with the team for letting his good friend Mark Ingram go in free agency. The camera never seemed to find him on the sideline tearing open one of his signature Airheads candies. Simply put, he did not appear to be happy in 2019.
Thomas hates that this was a thing. Not only does he feel the questions about Kamara’s body language were overblown, but he considers it a willing ignorance of the things the star running back was slogging through just to get to the field.
“Ultimately, he’s got to answer for himself,” Thomas said. “But when you have this weight of trying to perform … and you physically can’t do it to the expectations that you’re used to, it weighs on you.
“(When hurt, you) try to really focus on what you’re doing, and that may come off as bad body language. Dealing with him all the time, it was never I’m not interested or I’m mad. It was ‘My body is not responding.’ It just wasn’t right there for him for a while.”
That wasn’t the guy they were used to seeing. But there was confidence the Kamara of 2017 and 2018 was still there. That’s why the Saints rewarded Kamara with a $75 million contract before the start of the season, even when he wasn’t right the last time he was on the field.
And Thomas said it’s been “refreshing” to see Kamara being the player who defies explanation. “We’ve got our guy,” he said.
Then again, maybe they’ve got someone else. As spectacular as Kamara was in his first two seasons, quarterback Drew Brees sees a little extra lately.
“We’ve seen him make some plays the last few weeks that we’re used to seeing,” Brees said. “At the same time, it’s like there’s this extra gear, like there’s this extra juice.”
Brees has watched the defenders take the right angles to cut Kamara off just to end up sprawling out on the field empty-handed with the rest.
“And you just kind of shake your head,” Brees said.
That’s the sauce. Can’t really explain why, it just makes everything better.
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October 04, 2020 at 05:00AM
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Why resurgent Alvin Kamara has been the Saints' 'spaghetti sauce' through 3 weeks - NOLA.com
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