The Who Dats are still coming down from the heart-pounding, come-from-behind victory by the “Visitors” over their nemesis Atlanta Falcons last Sunday.
That’s obviously in reference to the scoreboard at Mercedes-Benz stadium, which refers to the Saints as simply that. No logo. No name. One clear statement.
For Week 2 the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be in the Caesars Superdome (with their name on the scoreboard) but I’m still not sure Saints fans are ready to move past that Week 1 win.
THE GAME | WEEK 2 | BUCS (1-0) at SAINTS (1-0)
- When: Noon, Sunday, Sept. 18
- Where: Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, Louisiana
- Betting: Saints +2.5
- TV: FOX
- Listen: WWL AM-870; FM-105.3 & the Audacy app
- Pregame: First Take with Jeff Nowak & Steve Geller (8-10 a.m.); Countdown to Kickoff with Bobby Hebert & Kristian Garic (10 a.m.-noon)
Deuce McAllister and I hosted our “Fans and the Pros” show on Friday, and the calls and texts were mostly, if not all, about Atlanta. That was 2 days before Tom Brady arrived in town for an early but still vitally important NFC South showdown between 1-0 teams. So, I ask you, are the Saints the Tampa really rivals? Or do we just want to beat Tom Brady and start off 2-0 in the division?
It feels like the latter to me, but that’s obviously subjective. There are not many things that point directly to this being a rivalry. The Saints have played 60 total games against Tampa. They’ve met in the postseason just one time. Yes, that painful 2020 divisional round loss that doubled as Drew Brees’ final start and a springboard to Tom Brady’s 7th Super Bowl title.
But every other Saints-Bucs matchup has come in the regular season, with New Orleans taking home the victory in 39 of them. That’s a win percentage of 65%, the Saints’ against any team they’ve played at least 8 games. That doesn’t sound like a rivalry to me. That “rivalry” has included two different 7-game winning streaks by the Saints. Again, that doesn’t sound like a rivalry to me, or at least a very good one. If you look at these two teams in the regular season through the decades, the Saints won the ‘70s, ‘80s, 2010s, and currently lead the 2020s 4-0. The Bucs held a slight edge in the 2000s, 9-8.
It's hard to ignore the expansion Tampa team getting its first NFL victory against the Saints in December of 1977 after 26 straight losses. But that year for the Saints was hardly memorable. The Bucs won that game in week 13, the penultimate week of a 14-game regular season that the Saints finished 3-11.
I think it’s fair to look at this rivalry question from 2002 forward, when Tampa and the Saints became members of the newly formed NFC South. Since then New Orleans has won seven division titles to Tampa’s four. One of the 4 for Tampa came in 2005, the year the Saints and the New Orleans area was struck by Hurricane Katrina.
What I think: This is a big game because it’s an NFC South foe. This is a big game because it’s against the same foe that stopped the Saints most recent domination and 4-year run of division titles. At best this is a Tom Brady vs. the Saints rivalry. Heck, you might even argue it’s a Jameis Winston vs the Bucs rivalry after that. But even those subplots are kind of weak. In Brady’s first 22 seasons he’s played the Saints only 9 times and has a losing record against them(4-5). Jameis Winston has only started one game against his former team, and he left after the first quarter with a season-ending knee injury. In the Sean Payton/Dennis Allen years Brady is 2-7. The two wins prior to the Payton/Allen years were in November of 2001 and then in 2005, again the Saints Katrina year.
I’m not even going to get into the “GOAT” conversation. Drew is gone. I know, I know, 7 Super Bowl rings. I get it. OK, maybe I’ll go down that road in my column for the second meeting on Dec. 18 in Tampa, but I am pretty sure I’ll forget.
So, to summarize for the scroll-to-the-bottom-type people: Saints fans want to beat Tom Brady. It wouldn’t matter whether he was on the Bucs, or the Patriots or the Birmingham Stallions. Tampa is simply the team he’s arriving on the bus with.
It’s also a chance to start 2-0 in a season for the first time since 2018. That’s enough intrigue all on its own, rivalry or no rivalry.
