New Orleans had a number of potential excuses for why they could play badly in the first game of the season.
Saints players and staff relocated from Louisiana to Texas amid Hurricane Ida’s destruction, and they are now temporary borrowers of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ TIAA Bank Field as the designated home team.
Sean Payton for the first time since 2005 is coaching a quarterback not named Drew Brees in a regular season game. And he is doing so against Green Bay, a team that easily could have made the Super Bowl last year and is determined to do so this year in perhaps quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s last season with the Packers.