Win, lose, or draw against the Patriots, the Saints will fly back to New Orleans.
It will mark the end of a 30-day displacement. A month away from home. A lot of hotel rooms. A month away from any consistent routine. They’ve had rooms in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and now Massachusetts. All the necessary stops if you are a presidential candidate looking for electoral votes, not so much an NFL team trying to reload after years of success.
Suitcases, buses, planes, hotels, unpacking, packing, and repeat is not the regimen teams strive for each season.
But if you ask the Saints organization how it’s affected the start of the 2021 season, you won’t hear much in the way of reasonable excuses for a 1-1 start. For one thing, they know a lot of folks back in south Louisiana are facing far worse predicaments.
While that’s true, you still have to think this is one exhausted football team as it lands in New England on Sunday night. Hotel living sounds fantastic at the front end, like a vacation, but that wears off, and it doesn’t take long. This is a long football season. Sunday only marks Week 3 of 18, but I guess that it doesn’t feel like a young and budding football season to this team. It feels like a training camp that never ended.
After the preseason win over Baltimore, the Saints were slated to play 4 of their next 6 games at home in Caesars Superdome. But then a preseason matchup with Arizona got canceled, the opener against Green Bay was moved to Jacksonville, and suddenly the New York Giants game on Oct. 3 represented the true “home” opener. Two regular-season home games in the first two months of the season would be rough on any team. Traveling that much and being away from home that long will wear anybody out, even a professional football player.
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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m not the greatest airplane person out there. I’ve got nothing against airplanes as long as they are on the ground, and I have flown more in the last month than I have in the last 10 years. Flying back from Jacksonville included a stopover in Charlotte. Then 5 days later, I’m back on a plane back to Charlotte for a game against the Panthers before a Monday flight home. Coming back from Boston includes a stopover in, wait for it — Charlotte.
That will be my fourth trip to the Charlotte Douglas Airport in the last 14 days. I like North Carolina and its 15 electoral college votes as much as anybody, but that's a stretch.
Usually, I’m not a huge fan of early-season open weeks for NFL teams, but Week 6 and the Saints’ bye week couldn’t be coming at a better time for this team, this year. A much-needed break, for sure. And guess what the team does before and after the open week? Travel. The eastern seaboard the week before and a game with the Washington Football team, and then to the northwest coast and Seattle after the open week.
A return home will be short-lived, even if it’s much needed. This team has to prove it can hang with both its opponents and the travel schedule this year.
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