New Orleans Saints | NFL, Football, History, & Notable Players | Britannica (original) (raw)

New Orleans Saints, American professional football team based in New Orleans that plays in the National Football Conference (NFC) of the NFL. The Saints have won one Super Bowl championship (2010).

(Read Walter Camp’s 1903 Britannica essay on inventing American football.)

The Saints began play in 1967 as an expansion franchise. Like most expansion teams, the Saints struggled in their first year in the NFL, losing 11 of their 14 games. However, the futility of the team’s efforts was particularly pronounced, as it took 20 years for them to post their first winning season. Over those first decades the team garnered the somewhat affectionate nickname “the ’Aints” from their fans—some of whom attended home games at the Louisiana Superdome with bags over their heads in reaction to the franchise’s prolonged ineffectiveness.

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Archie ManningLegendary New Orleans quarterback Archie Manning, who played for the team from 1971 to 1982.

Two notable figures to play for the Saints during that time were Archie Manning (father of future NFL quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Eli Manning), who was one of the most popular players in franchise history as quarterback of the team from 1971 to midway through the 1982 season, and Tom Dempsey, who kicked an NFL-record (tied in 1998) 63-yard game-winning field goal in 1970. In 1983 the team’s fans adopted a long-standing chant used at local high school and collegiate football games. The chant (“Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?”) is rooted in both Southern Black folk culture and in the minstrel “adaptation” of it. The term Who Dat became a byname for the franchise among members of its fan base.

Morten AndersonNew Orleans Saint kicker Morten Anderson was named to six Pro Bowls in his 13 seasons with the team (1982–94).

The Saints’ first winning season came in 1987, as a high-scoring offense led by quarterback Bobby Hebert and a stout defense starring linebackers Rickey Jackson and Sam Mills combined to propel the Saints to a 12–3 record and a playoff berth. However, the Saints badly lost their first postseason contest to the Minnesota Vikings. New Orleans had winning records again in 1988 and 1989 but failed to appear in either postseason. In 1990 the team began a streak of three consecutive years of playoff berths and first-round postseason losses. An unexpected star of those playoffs was placekicker Morten Andersen, who was named to six Pro Bowls in his 13 seasons with the team (1982–94) and would later go on to set the NFL record for most career points scored.

New Orleans soon returned to mediocrity, losing at least 10 games in each season between 1996 and 1999. The Saints had a surprising turnaround in 2000, however, winning 10 games to qualify for the postseason and defeating the reigning Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams for the franchise’s first playoff victory. Then the postseason eluded the Saints for the following five years.

The team’s return to the playoffs in 2006 was especially notable: having been forced to play all their 2005 “home” games outside New Orleans because of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Saints came back to the Superdome in 2006 and posted a 10–6 record under first-year head coach Sean Payton. Featuring a potent offense led by quarterback Drew Brees, the Saints became national media darlings as they rebounded from the previous season’s adversity and defeated the Philadelphia Eagles in the postseason en route to their first NFC championship game, which they lost to the Chicago Bears.

New Orleans Saints Results by Season: 2019–23

In 2009 the Saints won their first 13 games of the season and qualified for the playoffs as the NFC’s highest-seeded team. In the postseason they defeated the Arizona Cardinals and the Minnesota Vikings en route to the Saints’ first Super Bowl appearance, a victory over the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV. New Orleans won 11 games the following season but was upset by a seven-win Seattle Seahawks team in the opening round of the playoffs. The Saints had the NFL’s top-ranked offense once more in 2011 (for the fourth time in a six-year span) and again won 13 games, but the team was eliminated in the divisional round of the postseason by the San Francisco 49ers.

In March 2012 the NFL announced that it had learned that the Saints’ coaching staff ran a bounty program between 2009 and 2011 that gave financial rewards to New Orleans defensive players who injured opponents. As punishment for their roles in the program, Payton was suspended for the entire 2012 NFL season, former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams (who joined the Rams earlier in the 2012 offseason) was suspended indefinitely, and general manager Mickey Loomis was suspended for eight games. In addition to those unprecedented personnel sanctions, the team was fined $500,000 and stripped of two second-round draft picks.

Following that tumultuous offseason, the Payton-less Saints posted a disappointing 7–9 record, but the team rebounded in 2013 after he returned to the sidelines, winning 11 games and earning a playoff berth. While the team continued to field one of the better offenses in the NFL the following two years, the Saints’ defense became one of the worst in the league, and New Orleans posted three consecutive 7–9 records from 2014 to 2016.

An outstanding group of rookies helped the Saints break out of their rut in 2017, as the team won 11 games and a division title. New Orleans won its first playoff game before being eliminated from the postseason in heartbreaking fashion, as the Minnesota Vikings scored a 61-yard game-winning touchdown as time expired in the teams’ divisional-round matchup. The Saints bettered their regular-season play in 2018, winning 13 games to clinch the top seed in the NFC playoffs that year. However, the team’s postseason run again ended in frustration as a missed penalty call within the final two minutes prevented New Orleans from likely clinching the NFC championship game in regulation time, and the Saints went on to lose the contest in overtime.

The Saints tied for the best record in the NFC in 2019 (13–3) but—owing to New Orleans losing tiebreakers to the other two teams with that record—the team did not earn a postseason bye and had to play in the opening round of the playoffs, where it was upset by the Vikings at home. In the 2020 season the Saints finished 12–4 and then lost to the Tom Brady-led Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the divisional round of the playoffs. Brees retired in the following offseason. After winning nine games and missing the postseason, in early 2022 Payton left the team. The Saints managed to stay afloat following those important departures, posting 7–10 and 9–8 records in 2022 and 2023, respectively, but they did not qualify for the playoffs either year.