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.
