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The New York Times

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December 25, 2006

Sports of The Times

A Saints Super Bowl Title Isn’t a Giant Leap of Faith

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.

Until a few days ago, I dismissed the buzz about the Saints reaching the Super Bowl as romantic hype.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we began looking for something, anything, to ease the suffering of a region, a state and a city.

The Saints became it. New Orleans, the city, is persevering; New Orleans, the professional football team, is rising.

Last week, I attended a performance sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center featuring the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the musical director of the program and a New Orleans native. Marsalis made a bold prediction from the bandstand. He spoke about the city coming back, being revitalized, and he said the Saints would reach the Super Bowl and win the championship.

I thought: What faith.

In Marsalis’s lifetime, there has been no consistent history of winning professional football in New Orleans. It’s a wonder the city has any football fans at all.

After the set, I asked Marsalis about his prediction, specifically if he really felt the Saints were good enough to win a Super Bowl. He said this wasn’t about sports and statistics. “It’s a spiritual thing,” he said.

After watching the victory yesterday, Marsalis said in a telephone interview: “You got to believe. Sometimes you believe in something and it might not come true until 20 years later. Me and my brother were at the very first Saints game when John Gilliam ran back the first kickoff for a touchdown. We said, ‘We’re going win a championship.’ Now we’re old men, still looking.”

There’s an inherent danger in placing the hopes of a decimated state and city on the shoulder pads of a pro sports team. It’s a nice story, as long as the team wins. What happens when the bubble bursts and the team loses? Does the spirit die?

Marsalis was born in New Orleans in 1961. The city was awarded a pro football franchise five years later, and throughout his early life and teenage years, the Saints were losers.

“But the players were always involved in the community,” he said. “When I was in elementary school, Howard Stevens came to the school to present us with some awards. Man, I’ll never forget that.

“Everybody on that team stood for something in the community. That’s what I remember.”

Including this season, the Saints have had seven winning seasons. Marsalis was 18 when the Saints enjoyed their first nonlosing season, 8-8. He was 26 in 1987 when the Saints finished with their first winning record, 12-3 (during a strike year).

He will be 45 if the Saints march into the Super Bowl.

Last season, the Saints were thrown into chaos with the rest of their city. Things got so bad that Aaron Brooks, the Saints’ starting quarterback at the time, blasted the team’s owner, Tom Benson, and the National Football League.

The Saints lived a vagabond existence. Brooks told reporters that the league and Benson could have done much more to accommodate the players and coaches.

The Saints had to use the San Antonio Water Works building as a temporary headquarters, and a high school baseball field for practices. Their weight room was inside a tent.

The ultimate slight came when the Saints were ordered to play their first home game at Giants Stadium in front of a hostile crowd.

Things do come back around: Yesterday, the Saints turned the Giants’ crowd against the home team. By halftime, the fans were calling for Coach Tom Coughlin’s head.

The Saints’ surge this season is inspirational but also a story of good front-office moves and luck.

The Saints began the season with 27 new players. They drafted Reggie Bush — not exactly rocket science — but also traded Donte’ Stallworth in anticipation of Hofstra’s Marques Colston being a solid receiver as a rookie, and took a calculated chance on quarterback Drew Brees.

New Orleans clinched the National Football Conference South title last week. If Dallas loses to Philadelphia tonight, or if the Saints beat Carolina next week, New Orleans will clinch the conference’s No. 2 seeding.

After the victory, Deuce McAllister, the running back who has been with the Saints since 2001, said: “I haven’t won 10 games since high school. That is definitely a special feeling just to be able to walk onto the field after last year and some of the things we went through.”

This is a quirky franchise. Benson is quirky, too. I was thumbing through the Saints’ 2006 media guide, looking for the team’s history of wins and losses going back to 1967.

That history only went back to 1985, although the team began play in 1967. I kept flipping pages: 1985, that was it. Not coincidentally, that was the year Benson took over as the Saints’ owner. Beginning with the 2002 media guide, the Saints would not recognize franchise history before 1985. Keep this man away from your history department. The Saints’ history in the Benson era is seven winning seasons. There were no winning seasons from 1967 to 1984.

The Saints, the Chargers and the Jets are great stories for different reasons. One franchise is recovering from the effects of a natural disaster, another (the Jets) from a series of man-made blunders. The Chargers are the hot new face on the block.

“Listen,” Marsalis said. “We’ll take whatever we can get. We got to win a championship sometime; this is as good a time as any.”

I’ll consider jumping on the Saints’ Mardi Gras float. When Marsalis predicts, I’ll listen.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com