The Saints: America’s Team?
by Kristen Merrill

On the heels of their Super Bowl victory and subsequent celebration/Mardi Gras parade, the New Orleans Saints have posed a question: are they the new America’s Team? Have they succeeded the Dallas Cowboys at the top of the US’s collective consciousness? Are they the team fans root for in default? 

Saints fans have done little to put themselves front and center, but affection for their team has taken root organically. Even the most self-absorbed person or disconnected fan has an inkling of what New Orleans has dealt with these past five years. That understanding leads to fan empathy. We know instinctively - even if we don’t know the names of the Saints starting running back or place kicker - what a win meant for a city and a region needing something to smile about. We are sports fans. We understand the power of a win. We understand the cathartic nature of a championship, and how it can mean so much more than simply victory.

New Orleans is different from Dallas. The Cowboys were America’s Team largely because they identified themselves as such. Americans are Cowboys, sharpshooters and renegades. Therefore the Cowboys are America’s team. The term originated with the Cowboys’ 1978 highlight film when the narrator intoned: “They appear on television so often that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars. They are the Dallas Cowboys, America’s Team.”

In that sense, the Saints don’t compare. Aside from Reggie Bush’s dalliances with Kim Kardashian (here I quote my father: “What the hell is a Kardashian?”), Saints players are below the radar. In a league peppered with the headline-friendly likes of Brett Favre, Tom Brady, LaDainian Tomlinson and, god help us, Peyton Manning, Garrett Hartley and Tracy Porter have a hard time pulling focus.

Of course, quarterback Drew Brees has been showered with gratitude by Saints fans and appeared as Bacchus in this year’s Mardi Gras parade. He is more ready for prime time than ever, but the fact remains that until recently, the national sports media has not focused on New Orleans. That, in and of itself, indicates the pull this team has had on fans. Like the Patriots of 2001, the Saints function as a unit rather than individuals. They do not boast of individual accomplishments. Each player, when interviewed about the Super Bowl, mentioned the city of New Orleans and how its citizens needed and deserved a release after five long years.

When foreigners think of American football, they think Cowboys. I think it’s time for a change. If the rest of the world views the Saints as America’s Team, they view us as our best selves: an entire country working together to rebuild a quintessentially American city - a loud and dirty and raucous and influential and joyful metropolis. It’s often corrupt and backwards but that, too, is American - capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

In Chris Rose’s 2007 book 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, a collection of his post-hurricane Times-Picayune columns, he quotes an email from reader Judy Deck: “Without New Orleans, America would be just a bunch of free people dying of boredom.” The same could be said about the NFL this season. Without the Saints and their feel-good story, the NFL would have been a bunch of ambivalent fans awash in a never-ending stream of Favre sagas and talking heads debating Manning’s all-time greatness. 

This past week the Times-Picayune collected reaction from Saints fans across the country. Martha Lemen, a New Orleans native living in Tucson, Arizona reacted: “The win needed to happen and it seems the world was rootin’ for the underdog.”

Sure felt that way, didn’t it?

This is to take nothing away from the Saints themselves or the city of New Orleans. Ryan Boudreau, a 22-year-old Boston College premed from New Orleans, is correct when he tells me that the Saints belong to New Orleans and no one else. But New Orleanians - even Ryan - are the kind of people who will make room for anyone and everyone at a party. 

Rose wrote a column for the Times-Picayune in September, 2006 after the Saints played and won their first Monday Night Football game in the Superdome since Katrina. Some of his words ring true today: “It’s a long road home no matter what colored glasses you’re wearing today but there is something about waking up in a community that is thinking the same thing, that is feeling - if only for a moment - like we all just accomplished something together - when actually it was a bunch of millionaires whose names we hardly know.” Rose goes on to describe the outpouring of emotion and release the city experienced after the game: “It is good to feel like a winner.”

America can get behind that. Regardless of your geographic location or rooting affiliation, you have to have a soft spot for the Saints. At your best, you have to want the people of New Orleans to celebrate something, to feel like winners. Surely the inevitable backlash is on, the way it so often is for successful teams. But for now, for this moment and time, we can all revel in the victory of America’s new team. Because the Super Bowl was a hell of a lot bigger than a Super Bowl usually is. I quote Rose again when talking about that Monday night game: “Only a game, you say? Like hell it was.”

Kristen Merrill, a freelance writer, is a 2002 graduate of Emerson College. She lives in Cambridge with her New York sports fan boyfriend, not to mention several dust bunnies and bobbleheads. Her column appears daily at NESN.com (www.nesn.com/kristen-merrill/). She also runs the popular sports blog “Basegirl” (www.basegirl.blogspot.com). She’s a sucker for Boston sports teams, straight tequila, and power ballads. Particularly Journey.