The New Orleans Saints are looking to do some damage next season. Will they overtake the Buccaneers for the top spot at NFC South? Sure is not. Will they compete? May. They will be a capable team with the talent to win multiple games, and with the NFL schedule officially announced, some have realized that the Saints have a chance to do something no other team has ever seen. ever done before in the history of the NFL… beat all five bird teams in a single season.
The Saints will play the Atlanta Falcons in Weeks 1 and 15. They will play the Seattle Seahawks at home in Week 5. They face the Arizona Cardinals two weeks later for Thursday Night Football. They have the Baltimore Ravens on Week 9 and they get the Philadelphia Eagles on New Year’s Day Week 17. That’s all the bird teams in the NFL and surprisingly no team has beaten all 5 in the same season.
There are some caveats that prevent certain teams from running this glove. For example, since four of these bird teams participate in NFC, the team that wants to make history must also participate in NFC. All the bird teams are clearly out, and each team still running can only try the feat every four years because that’s how often they face the AFC North. I still don’t understand that while a team might be lucky enough to face NFC West that same year, they would also have to be lucky and finish in the same position as the Eagles or Falcons last season. It’s a cluster of scheduling miracles that fall into the perfect place for any team to get this chance, but hey, it’s ahead of the Saints and freshman head coach Dennis Allen.
This rarely happens, it happened as recently as 2020. The Dallas Cowboys faced each of these teams in Weeks 2, 3, 6, 8, 13 and 16. Apparently, the Eagles are in their division, so they’ve had the privilege of playing them twice (Weeks 8 and 16), just as the Saints have had the privilege of playing the Falcons twice this year (Weeks 1 and 15). Unfortunately for the Cowboys, their quest to go where no team had gone before came to a halt when they fell to the Seahawks 38-31 in Week 3. They couldn’t even get past the second bird. Pitiful. Hopefully the Saints can address this conundrum that has haunted the NFL since its inception.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “What about cat gloves?” The cat glove in Jacksonville, Cincinnati, Carolina, and Detroit still exists, but running that glove is practically impossible. Since there are two such teams in each game, the team that tries to run the glove will face the final cat team in the Super Bowl if they want to get ahead. The Rams beat the Lions and Jaguars in the regular season last year, and even scored a win over the Bengals in the Super Bowl, but they never had a chance to beat the lowly Carolina Panthers. And before you ask, no, they didn’t face the Panthers in the pre-season, so you can rule that out too.
The 2015 Denver Broncos beat the Lions, Panthers and Bengals, but never faced the Jaguars. The 2003 Patriots didn’t face the Bengals or the Lions, and that’s been every case of a cat team reaching the Super Bowl since the Carolina Panthers came out in 1993, so that’s never been done either, but in fact it is not possible.
The birdfight will be tough, as two of them – the Eagles and Cardinals – have both made it to the knockout stages in 2021. Raven is also a great team. It’s not too hard for the Saints to get a win over the Seahawks and Falcons, but that’s less than half as much as the gauntlet. It will be tiring. It will be difficult, but it will be history, and I have always witnessed it.
