The New Orleans Saints play in sunny Louisiana, and the Green Bay Packers play in frigid Wisconsin. The differences in climate make it difficult to simulate the weather the Saints are about to endure when they play the Packers on Monday night, so quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko has had to get creative.
Current forecasts have the weather at 25 degrees on Monday night at Lambeau Field, with a possibility for snow. Meanwhile, it is over 40 degrees in New Orleans. So what were the Saints to do?
A lot has been made of the improvements to the team cafeteria this summer (as part of construction on the facilities that moved training camp to California), but the Saints probably didn’t think they’d be practicing in the walk-in freezers. To attempt to prepare for the Wisconsin weather, Janocko had Spencer Rattler and Jake Haener run through plays in the cafeteria freezer, set at a frosty 10 degrees.
“Hopefully it’s not 10 degrees (at Lambeau Field), but we’ll be ready,” Rattler said this week.
Janocko got the innovative idea from Cool Runnings, the classic 1993 film about the Jamaican Olympics bobsled team. While he opted to put the quarterbacks in the freezer instead of an ice cream truck, Janocko said the reactions to the innovative move were positive: “(The) guys thought it was hilarious. The cafeteria workers think I’m out of my mind.”
For a team that rarely experiences this type of weather, this was a creative way to give the quarterbacks a chance to feel a semblance of the weather they’re about to walk into.
