Thoughts on Saints schedule

At the bottom you’ll find the Saints schedule, not that you haven’t already seen and digested it many times now. I’m late in giving my opinion on it but I wanted to at least give it its just due and acknowledgement. The first word that came to mind when I saw this schedule was “manageable”. I still have no idea what to expect from this Saints team and I don’t know how good we can realistically expect them to be. If this is going to be a “down year” though, a decent schedule may be what the doctor ordered to keep them competitive.

I don’t love starting at Arizona because it could be blazing hot and in general you like to start the season 1-0. The Cardinals have a brutal defense and this will be a tough matchup. The silver lining is Carson Palmer will potentially be rusty coming back from an ACL tear.

I do like the more even distribution of road, home, road, home. I really didn’t like 3/4 road games to start the year last year, or the 3 game home stretch where the players get almost too comfortable staying in New Orleans. Most importantly there really are no “cold” games or awful West Coast trips. The furthest they travel is to Arizona to open the season with 10 days to prepare, with a home game the week after. I also like that the bye week comes later in the year and that it’s sandwiched in between the only back to back road games of the year.

You know the Saints play their best ball on prime time at home and all three prime time games are at home this year. So that feels like a favorable item, too. As a Saints fan I don’t think you can complain much at all about this schedule. The middle of the season run between the Cowboys and Giants games is a tough stretch, but the end of the season softens up considerably. I was surprised to see the home game against the Jags show up so late in the season. All in all it’s a manageable schedule to navigate and you have to think it plays out favorably for having a decent season. No complaints here.