Seventeen carries, eighteen yards. The New Orleans Saints spent the afternoon of October 25 at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis handing the ball to their backs and getting barely more than a yard each time. That number explains their season better than the 16-10 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, played in front of 78,488 spectators at the first NFL regular-season game ever staged in France. Pittsburgh was not a great opponent. Nor was it bad luck. The Saints could not run the ball, and the defense across the line knew it.

New Orleans goes into its bye week at 2-5, and Pete Prisco's Week 8 power rankings at CBS Sports put the Saints 27th, one spot behind the Jets and one ahead of Arizona, in a cluster of 2-5 teams separated by margins so thin they are close to cosmetic. Prisco gave the Saints two sentences and softened neither of them: the missing running game "is killing this team," and they are "way too one-dimensional to consistently win games."

The awkward part is that the quarterback is not the problem.

Thirty completions, seven rushing yards

Tyler Shough went 30 of 38 for 278 yards in Paris and tied the game 10-10 on fourth-and-goal with a 1-yard throw to Devaughn Vele. Pregame reports said he did all of it with two broken bones in his non-throwing hand. He was also the team's leading rusher, with 7 yards on three attempts, a line that in a professional offense reads less like a statistic than like a charge sheet against the whole system. His only interception came in the red zone in the third quarter, when linebacker Payton Wilson jumped a throw meant for Chris Olave. Wilson explained afterwards, without a trace of irony, that he had "repped that play, no lie, more than 20 times" in practice that week.

More than twenty reps in practice, one snap on Sunday. That interception is the Saints' season in miniature. Without a credible run threat there is no play-action and no linebacker forced into a false step, so every down turns into a passing down the defense has had a full week to study. Shough said the same thing after the game, in the plain words of someone who watches it unfold from the pocket every Sunday: "they know what's coming in certain situations and they're a good defense."

A team that can only pass lets the defense prepare in advance, and Pittsburgh prepared.

Kellen Moore did not reach for schemes or excuses either. "When you have a day like today, 17 runs for 18 yards, it's going to be hard to win football games doing that," the head coach said in comments carried by the Associated Press. On the team's official site he added the line that will hang over the bye: "Margins are small in this game and when you have your opportunities you've got to take advantage of them."

Paris did give him those opportunities. Two Saints fumbles in the first half, Shough's after a T.J. Watt hit and another by Kendre Miller, were overturned on review, and the ball stayed with New Orleans both times. Neither reprieve produced a point. In the fourth quarter Daniel Carlson pushed a 52-yard field goal wide, his fourth miss in eleven attempts this season. The last drive ended in a punt.

Across the field, Pittsburgh played the control group. Jaylen Warren ran for 101 yards on 18 carries, the Steelers finished with 148 rushing yards on 30 attempts and converted 10 of 16 third downs, and after declining a field goal to keep the ball they ran out the final 5:52 on the ground. Aaron Rodgers threw for only 212 yards. His 4-yard touchdown to Darnell Washington was the 540th of his career and moved him past Peyton Manning into third place all time, yet even that milestone felt incidental to the afternoon. He had no need to do more, because the running game did the rest.

Put the two offenses side by side and the result looks like a controlled experiment, one in which the less productive quarterback had a running game behind him and won. That is why Pittsburgh is 5-2 and on a three-game winning streak, while New Orleans sits in the league's bottom six.

None of this started in France. In the September opener Shough threw for 410 yards and three touchdowns and Detroit still won in overtime, and in early October he struggled in a loss to Atlanta. The passing game keeps the Saints close enough to compete. With nothing from the run, it does not win them games.

Two weeks to find a second dimension

The bye arrives with a clear diagnosis and no obvious cure, although Prisco's own list suggests the hole is shallower than it looks. From 21st to 28th he has eight teams with identical 2-5 records, the Saints among them, and in a pack bunched that tightly one functional running game could lift a team several places within a couple of weeks.

That job falls to Moore, who has two weeks to rebuild an offensive identity with an injured quarterback and a kicker who has missed more than a third of his attempts. Until he does, New Orleans will keep playing as it did in Paris: in one dimension, against opponents who already know what is coming.