Bang: the New Orleans Saints knocked off the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday to win 21-18, improving their record to 5-9 on the year. But this is big for bragging rights in the NFL’s best rivalry series. Beyond having swept the Falcons in 2022, the Saints have now caught Atlanta in the all-time record with their oldest rivals.
If you include the one playoff meeting (which the Falcons won), both teams are now tied up at 54-54 head-to-head. If you only count regular season games, New Orleans leads the series 54-53. The Saints and Falcons started out together in the old NFC West, and they moved on to form the NFC South together in 2002. They’ve been squaring up twice a year ever since.
The Falcons have led the series by 10 or more games twice, by the way. They enjoyed a 44-32 lead when Sean Payton was hired as head coach way back in 2006. But Payton went 21-9 against the dirty birds (the Saints split the series 1-1 without him in 2012), and now Dennis Allen has swept them in 2022. A win next year puts New Orleans ahead no matter how you slice it.
It’s kind of fitting that the Saints would tie it all up with Atlanta during the most disappointing, hard-to-watch campaign in recent memory. For years fans in New Orleans and Atlanta would both say that even if they lost every other game, they could live with it so long as they beat that other team. It’s not ideal to have to look for things like this as silver linings, but look: times are hard, and we’ll take them. Just like the Saints took this win and, depending on how you look at it, the all-time record.
