The Saints Have Placed Patrick Robinson On IR, As What Was Originally Thought To Be A High Ankle Sprain Is Really A Broken Ankle

The #Saints are expected to place CB Patrick Robinson on Injured Reserve with a broken ankle, sources tell me and @MikeGarafolo. A big blow to their secondary.

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) September 25, 2018

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Without doing too much research, I think I can confidently say that not one professional football season has ever come and gone without a team having had to endure a single serious injury to a starter. Knowing the New Orleans Saints' luck, they definitely weren't about to be the first. 

​Of course, you typically prefer that those injuries don't come as a result of scumbag maneuvers made in a game that's plenty dangerous enough without lineman intentionally rolling the entirety of their body weight over the ankle of someone half their size...

We can’t place a qb on the ground but it’s ok for a 300 LB lineman to intentionally barrel roll into a Defensive backs knee. Plays like this are either ending careers or altering a players career. pic.twitter.com/5RXMTeRbtZ

— Will Blackmon (@WillBlackmon) September 23, 2018

It also goes without saying that, if you absolutely have to absorb a loss in your starting lineup, you hope upon hope that it doesn't end up coming at the expense of the one player in a position group that somehow had gone relatively guilt-free despite being a part of a unit that's gotten shredded to the tune of 103 points in three games. 

Make no mistake, with the flat out frightening manner in which Ken Crawley and P.J. Williams have performed thus far, Patrick Robinson getting carted out of the slot and onto the IR hurts in a way that's reminiscent of when the Saints' primary source for secondary help was plucking dudes off the street in 2016. Granted, they didn't have a top-notch talent like Marshon Lattimore at the time, but if Calvin Ridley's unencumbered track meet on Sunday was any indication than this team needs a lot more than one capable corner if they want whatever broken scheme they've been running to be even mildly successful. 

Report: Sterling Moore visiting Saints Tuesday https://t.co/HvXcIwL6Yb

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) September 25, 2018

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The news of a potential Sterling Moore signing is encouraging in the sense that he's familiar with the team, but it's discouraging in the sense that said team was pretty damn hopeless  when he was fighting above his weight class in playing a significant role for it. Oddly enough, one of the better efforts of his first tenure came against Odell Beckham Jr. the last time the Saints traveled to New York for an early season showdown. Unfortunately, that's not me trying to predict a repeat performance as much as it's me pointing out the deja voodoo of misdiagnoses and trying to patch a secondary that's as wounded as its confidence with a stopgap like Sterling Moore. 

The fact is that the Saints need Ken Crawley to figure out what the hell changed over the summer and start treating this season like the contract year that it is. They need Marcus Williams to stop trying to improvise his way past his nightmarish end to last season. They need Dennis Allen to make a damn adjustment or two to a defunct defense that's easily looked the weakest at it's presumed strength. With their d-line coming around and their linebackers developing a bit of chemistry, they can overcome the loss of one of the better slot corners in the league. Whether or not they actually will, however, is dependent on the last line of defense changing things up a bit by actually playing some.