Dannell Ellerbe Is Hurt...Again, And Will Be Cut By The Saints When "Healthy"

#Saints are placing LB Dannell Ellerbe on Injured Reseved, source said. He has a foot injury. He'll be waived when healthy... & be a hot FA

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) July 25, 2017

With @RapSheet reporting that Ellerbe is going on IR, Saints' WLB competition is a lot more interesting. Stupar, Robertson, Anzalone at top.

— Josh Katzenstein (@jkatzenstein) July 25, 2017

Payton on soon-to-be-cut Dannell Ellerbe: Ultimately, it came down to availability. There were far too many games he wasn't available.

— Josh Katzenstein (@jkatzenstein) July 26, 2017

In a super depressing way, this is oddly poetic. I don't want to make light of a player's never-ending battle with his own body to stay on the field, because Danell Ellerbe showed flashes of greatness (relative to the piss poor defense he was a part of) during the fleeting moments in which he wasn't injured. However, I would simply be ignoring the irony if I didn't point out how fitting it was for his last days as a New Orleans Saint to play out with him physically unable to contribute a damn thing to the New Orleans Saints.

Due to no fault of his own (other than questionable genetics), Danell Ellerbe basically strung along an entire franchise and their fanbase. He led them (i.e. us) on with an unspoken promise of better days being ahead when he proved capable of defending the pass and rushing the passer, and left us standing their unfulfilled when his name inevitably popped up on the injury report just three days later. Knowing the Saints' luck/medical staff, some team will scoop him off the waiver wire and he'll magically become more durable than 'Deadpool'. Until that day comes, my skepticism about whether or not 6-8 games of Danell Ellerbe is better than 16 games of the 53rd man on the roster is temporarily quelled by freeing myself of the bi-weekly stress of wondering when those 6-8 games were going to come. Plus, if the goal was to find some defensive consistency then this was simply a move that had to be made.

Now, I certainly hope that Sean Payton's optimism about the additions the team made over the offseason played a large part in the decision to cut ties with Danell Ellerbe. Given his track record, I'm not sure his positivity and confidence means all that much. That said, he damn well better have at least seen the makings of a solid, yet unspectacular linebacking core before he preemptively cut potentially the most skilled person in it. If nothing else, this puts more pressure on players like A.J. Klein and Manti Te'o to make seamless transitions into a new system and players like Craig Robertson and Nate Stupar to build on fairly promising seasons, because the Saints damn sure didn't have enough proven talent last year to risk losing even the most unreliable of talent this year.