"The New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl last season with the NFL's No. 1 offense. They were about as optimally balanced as a team could be with the fourth-best passing scheme and the No. 6 running game.

They didn't live by Drew Brees alone, but it's not like they had Chris Johnson, either.

The Saints ran the ball by committee in '09, with no one gaining more than Pierre Thomas' 793 yards. In doing so, they have shown what is possible without a dominant rusher when you have a very dangerous quarterback.

Whether they can do it again this season remains open to question. Mike Bell is gone. Two other backs were injured in preseason (including P.J. Hill, although it's debatable how much the bouncing Badger would've contributed in his second go-round in New Orleans), making the Saints' ability to keep 'em guessing once more a topic of reasonable discussion.

While no certainties are established in an opener, the Saints were OK running the ball last Thursday night in the second half against that stout defense from Minnesota with Thomas and modest input from the guy whose trophy shelf is about to become 25 pounds lighter.

It's of some interest that DeShawn Wynn is now on the Saints' roster as a matter of necessity, but there are far more instructive cues on how this all applies to the Green Bay Packers and that 1,200-yard hole suddenly blown in their backfield.

The life-in-the-NFL fact that the Packers must carry on their Super Bowl aspirations without Ryan Grant could be exacerbated by the way they shaped their roster. By most counts the Packers began the year with a couple of tailbacks, although Mike McCarthy insisted Sunday in Philadelphia that they had five, including three who could legitimately be counted upon as NFL ball-carriers.

They were down to two-ish as of Tuesday with Brandon Jackson and John Kuhn, both of whom were better than most would've expected against the Eagles after the league's seventh-best rusher from last season suffered that potentially devastating season-ending ankle injury.

While it's just as sensible to believe that that the Packers will have to find another body just as certain as Jackson/Kuhn won't replicate what Grant has accomplished in the last two seasons, it's not as if the Packers have been relegated to second-citizen status without their lead back.

Of course, the Saints have a better offensive line. As Aaron Rodgers noted Sunday, it was troubling to him that the Packers gave up three early sacks when the Eagles were in their base defense. If the Packers can't get anything going on the ground, what would happen if defenses really came after the quarterback with the blitz?

The 700 or so sacks the Packers were on pace to allow before they got the line straightened out last season, that's what.

But the encouraging thing for the Packers amidst a Wednesday morning hangover of this magnitude is that Rodgers won't have many more QB ratings of 73.1 like he