This is very disappointing. The New Orleans Saints won’t be opening their training camp practices at UC Irvine to the public, per NewOrleans.Football’s Nick Underhill. We expected this when every other team practicing in Southern California this summer announced plans for fans to attend their training camps, but there’s confirmation.
While the Saints aren’t fully to blame for this, they ultimately are at fault for taking their largest and most-accessible event out of Louisiana and sending it to the other end of the country. Because they’re holding camp in another NFL city, the Rams and Chargers would have had to sign off on allowing the Saints to promote themselves in the L.A. market. Previous comments from team president Dennis Lauscha suggested that wouldn’t be a problem, but it appears he was mistaken.
The Raiders are in a similar boat. They can’t open practices to the public, but they compromised with the Rams and Chargers by inviting several hundred Los Angeles-area season ticket holders to a limited number of their training camp dates. It’s a shame the Saints couldn’t even do that much, even if it’s unlikely many of their own season ticket holders live in L.A.
Which brings things full circle. If NFL rules prohibited this, someone in the front office should have known about it and said so sooner. The Saints should never have made plans to relocate training camp to Los Angeles in the first place. They could have gone anywhere in America and they chose to move camp somewhere that would be challenging for their home crowd to follow. Whether it’s Lauscha or general manager Mickey Loomis making that call, someone high up in the organization made a big mistake.
It’s not like they didn’t have options. They could have gone back to the Greenbrier in West Virginia or Millsaps College in Mississippi. They could have gone to St. Louis, San Diego, or another city with NFL ties and the means to support a team for a few weeks of practice. Instead they made this decision, and it was a bad call.
At a time when the Saints have failed to reach the playoffs for three years while being led by a head coach whose own players graded poorly, it’s a bad look. Instead of working to reach out to the community and reassure their supporters that things are trending up, giving fans an opportunity to watch practice and get autographs and make memories, everything is going to be fed to them secondhand by the few media outlets allowed to attend practice on the other side of the country.
The NFL rules are what they are, but ultimately Loomis and Lauscha and their staff should know better than to let them become a problem. Local fans who invest the most in their team will have to wait until the Saints return to New Orleans in August for two open practices at Tulane’s Yulman Stadium and the Caesars Superdome. It’s better than nothing, but fans still deserve more than what they’re being given.
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