We’re in for the New Orleans Saints’ first cold-weather game of the year, and there’s already a narrative buzzing that the Saints can’t win in the wind and snow. It’s a lazy narrative built on their status as a dome team from a warm-weather locale, but on its face there’s some merit to it. They’ve only won 6 of their 17 games played at below-freezing temperatures, per Stathead via Pro Football Reference, but that’s more of a product of the Saints playing bad football for several decades.
The Saints went 4-7 in cold-weather games before Sean Payton was hired as head coach, a period in which they won just 237 of the 594 games they played from 1967 to 2005. New Orleans fielded bad teams often, regardless of the weather forecast.
But the narrative is the narrative, and we’re about to hear a lot of chatter on the Saints not being built for the wind and snow. Even though New Orleans has won each of its last two games played in freezing temperatures. Here’s their game-by-game history under 32 degrees: