subject: New Orleans Saints Tickets : The Saints Lost Their Games Many Times [print this page] The New Orleans Saints are a professional football team based in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are the current champions of the National Football League (NFL) and play in the South Division of the National Football Conference (NFC).
The Saints were founded on November 1, 1966 as an expansion team and played their home games at Tulane Stadium through the 1974 season. They went more than a decade before they managed to finish a season with a .500 record, two decades before having a winning season, and over four decades before reaching the Super Bowl. The team's first successful years were from 1987/1992, when the team made the playoffs four times and had winning records in the non-playoff seasons. In the 2000 season, the Saints defeated the then-defending Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams for the team's first playoff win.
The Saints reached the NFC Championship Game in the 2006 season but lost 39/14 to the Chicago Bears. They repeated this feat in their most successful season in 2009, this time winning the game and their first conference championship to send them to their first Super Bowl appearance. At Super Bowl XLIV, the Saints won the city of New Orleans its first league championship, defeating the Indianapolis Colts 31-17.
Since 1975, the Saints' home stadium has been the Louisiana Superdome, except for the 2005 disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina.
First the brainchild of local sports entrepreneur Dave Dixon, who also founded the Louisiana Superdome and the USFL, the Saints were actually secretly born in a backroom deal brought about by Congressman Hale Boggs, Senator Russell Long and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. The NFL needed congressional approval of the proposed AFL-NFL merger.Dixon and a local civic group had been seeking a NFL franchise for over 5 years, and had hosted record crowds for NFL exhibition games.
To seal the merger, Rozelle arrived in New Orleans within a week, and announced on November 1, 1966 that the NFL officially had awarded the city of New Orleans an NFL franchise. The team was named for the great jazz song most identified with New Orleans / "When the Saints Go Marching In", and it was no coincidence that the franchise's official birth was announced on November 1, which is the Catholic All Saints' Day. When the deal was reached a week earlier, Dixon strongly suggested to Rozelle that the announcement be delayed until then. Dixon told an interviewer that he even cleared the name with New Orleans' Archbishop Philip M. Hannan: "He thought it would be a good idea. He had an idea the team was going to need all the help it could get."
Boggs' Congressional committee in turn quickly approved the NFL merger. John W. Mecom, Jr., a young oilman from Houston, became the team's first majority stockholder. The team's colors, black and gold, symbolized both Mecom's and New Orleans' strong ties to the oil ("black gold") industry.Trumpeter Al Hirt was part owner of the team, and his rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In" was made the official fight song.
That first season started with a 94 yard opening kickoff return for a touchdown by John Gilliam, but the Saints lost that game 27/13 to the Los Angeles Rams at Tulane Stadium. Their first season record was 3/11, which set an NFL record for most wins by an expansion team. However, they could not manage to finish as high as second in their division until 1979. That 1979 team and the 1983 team were the only ones to even finish at .500 until 1987.
One of the franchise's shining moments came on November 8, 1970, when Tom Dempsey kicked an NFL record-breaking 63 yard field goal to defeat the Detroit Lions by a score of 19/17 in the final seconds of the game. This record, although equaled 29 years later by Jason Elam of the Denver Broncos, has yet to be broken.
In 1980, the Saints lost their first 14 games, prompting local sportscaster Bernard "Buddy D" Diliberto to advise Saints supporters to wear paper bags over their heads at the team's home games; many bags rendered the club's name as the "'Aints" rather than the "Saints." The practice of wearing a bag over one's head then spread rapidly, first to fans of other poorly performing teams within the NFL, and ultimately to those of other American team sports, and has become a firmly established custom throughout the United States.
