Saints

Drew Brees arrived in New Orleans in 2006 with a shoulder that had scared off other suitors, in a city still counting what Hurricane Katrina had taken the year before, and the two rebuilt around each other. The Saints had spent their home season on the road that year, in Baton Rouge, San Antonio and East Rutherford, and Brees became the face of a team that gave the city something to organise itself around again. Four seasons later he took them to a first Super Bowl, beating the Indianapolis Colts 31–17, and the win read less as a football result than as proof the place could still produce something worth cheering.

The Saints trace their name to All Saints' Day, chosen when the franchise was granted in November 1966 as a nod to the city's Catholic character, with a second life in the jazz refrain of "When the Saints Go Marching In." Locally they go by "Who Dat," pulled from the terraces as much as from any front office. For nearly two decades after the club's founding, the nickname carried more affection than results; it took the Jim Mora years from the mid-1980s to turn the Superdome into a place opponents worried about, and it took Brees to turn division titles into a habit, with seven National Football Conference (NFC) South crowns collected since 2006.

Not everything in that stretch was clean.

None of it settles anything with Atlanta. The Falcons sit across the NFC South and across a rivalry that predates any of the Saints' banners, the one game each year New Orleans measures itself against regardless of where either team stands in the standings.