SI.com: NO & Saints deserve final hurrah

[j-6]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200.../24/roy/1.html

Once it was safe for the sports cynics to express themselves following the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, they didn't waste any time giving their thoughts on the ultimate fate of the New Orleans Saints: "This," they said, "may have been the best thing to happen to Tom Benson."

Benson owns the Saints, who've long been as beleaguered on the field (they're 2-5 in this lost season) as off. Even before Katrina struck, their home, the Superdome, was a relic akin to the Parthenon. In its heyday it was an homage to a generation where bigger was best and biggest was enough to attract conventions of all sizes. And Super Bowls.

Now no one wants to be in the Dome, not with those lasting images of the building as a failed and frightful refuge for thousands of New Orleans's poorest, those who had neither the means to escape Katrina nor the resources to endure what she wrought. And with so many of the Saints fans having been driven from their homes, Benson sees an opening to permanently relocate his team to drier, more habitable environs, a move that he's been pondering for years.

The leading candidate is San Antonio, where the Vagab-aints have played two "home" games this season and whose mayor has been drooling over the Saints like a geek over the prom queen. "I will use every effort I can to get the Saints here permanently," he told a San Antonio TV station last week. "I'm not backing down."

The mayor's remark came on the heels of another blown gasket by his New Orleans compadre, Ray Nagin, whose powers of bluster and overstatement are all too familiar to us now. "We got the doggone Saints talking about going to San Antonio; let 'em go," Nagin barked, alluding to the Saints front office. "We want our Saints. We may not want the owner back."

This was upon learning Benson's attorneys had sent a letter to Superdome officials stating that the team's practice site, in Jefferson parish, was so damaged that it was unusable "for some time [if ever]." The Saints pay but $1 annually to lease the facility, so the site would seem to mean little in the overall soap opera that has embroiled the Saints and their city in recent years. But New Orleans officials believe the letter was Benson's first move in a legal game that could cost the city its team.

Indeed, Benson has already fired one of his team's top executives, one said to have been a proponent of remaining in New Orleans. A day later the team's top marketing and business development official resigned. The team has also said that the Dome has been too damaged by elements -- both environmental, human and governmental -- to ever be usable by the Saints again.

Let's all be grownups here. The New Orleans Saints are history. Or at least Benson's Saints are. They'll be playing in San Antonio on a permanent basis before Joe Horn stops talking.

And Benson has every right to move the team in search of luxury boxes, concession revenue and profits. Or almost every right.

Owning a professional sports franchise is, in part, a public trust. Teams are a scarce commodity able to be owned only by a minuscule percentage of filthy-rich Americans with outsized-egos. I'm not mad at 'em; it's the American way. But in exchange for such public trust, owners must, at times, do something that belies their immediate best interests.

Superdome officials say the building should be ready for the Saints to re-inhabit at some point next season. If they can assure that to be true, then Benson should return to New Orleans for one more season, one final season.

In perhaps the best idea Nagin has had since August (some of those aforementioned cynics might say it's the only good idea he's had), the New Orleans mayor asked that the city be granted the right to the Saints "brand," just as Cleveland was granted in 1996, when then-Browns owner Art Modell stormed out of the city and took his leather balls to Baltimore.

Any NFL fan under 15 years old might have no clue that today's Browns are anything but Jim Brown's Browns. We all know better, but to those wackos in the Dawg Pound, these Browns are theirs today and always. The NFL smartly recognized that while Modell owned the team, the city and its fans were invested in the Browns. Do you think the city would have embraced, say, the Cleveland Ravens as quickly as it did the "expansion" Browns. Not even close.

Like Cleveland, New Orleans owns its Saints, and would embrace the Saints II as quickly as Cleveland did its Browns. Probably more so given the franchise's sorry history and the city's tortured relationship with Benson.

Yet here's the rub: New Orleans is no Cleveland.

Cleveland was only devastated figuratively by the departure of its beloved Browns. New Orleans was ravaged in every way by a true disaster and will never be the same city that so wants its Saints. It will likely be smaller, much smaller, by the estimates of some experts, who also have stated that more than half of the city's 450,000 residents were evacuated and have not returned. Many will never return.

City officials confirmed over the weekend that as many as 50,000 of the city's 180,000 homes may be beyond repair. They're not talking about bulldozing entire neighborhoods. At least not yet. But entire blocks of homes marked for elimination will soon become vacant lots.

All of this is sad beyond measure.

New Orleans has problems, even still incomprehensible problems that will not be solved by the return of a sorry football team. But the city deserves to welcome its Saints home next season and to say good-bye.

Even if only to say: Don't let the Dome kick you on the way out.

[exstatic]

I read this today. Stupidest idea ever. If you think THIS was a tough season, wait until those fans would get ahold of a team they knew was leaving. The folks with the bags would be the friendliest ones...

[McKenzie]

Ya know........

What REALLY bugs me about this issue of where the Saints will play since their CITY was pretty much scrubbed from the Earth by Mother Nature is that assholes like Nagin are NOT talking about those people we have living at Kelly USA, Houston's Dome and public housing all over Texas, everywhere, on the taxpayer's dime. Do you hear him asking if poor ole Mr. and Mrs. So&So of Whatever Street are coming back to rebuild and clean up their sacred and ravaged New Olreans so that the Saints can come marching back home? Uh......No. But, he sure is ing about getting the team back.

What if the efforts of Louisiana are NOT making the Saints, who spent a big bunch of bucks to help out evacuees, happen to think that these people don't want to clean-up, make better and fend for themselves and their city so that everyone can come "home", and have decided that they've had enough of people sitting on their unemployed asses, complaining and fighting over the team and they don't want to go back now? (That was a long sentence...sorry) If I was a pro star, I'd look at the lack of effort on the part of the displaced citizens, who happen to be outraged at our "looting" of the team moreso than they are outraged at the utter filth and destruction of Nawlins, and say "Later." But, hey....that's just my humble opinion.

I happen to be from New Orleans or as I like to call it, Nawlins, and I'm sickened that there are so many people sitting around doing NOTHING while our city needs to be tended to. Leave the team out of this mess. The city needs to be put back together. While these nay-sayers and San Antonio haters sit on their hands, moaning, the clean-up is creeping along, at best, and the NFL won't send a team back there for some time.

Someone needs to wake up and smell the coffee.......with chickory and heavy cream.......yummy.