Another consequence for Saints...
 

Adding insult to injury imposed....the next to last paragraph and last sentence!!!!! If true, this is really beginning to PI$$ me off.

NFC North colleague Kevin Seifert brought up an excellent point about an additional consequence of the New Orleans Saints’ bounty scandal.

You can almost certainly cross the Saints off the list of teams to play the season-opening Wednesday night (Sept. 5) game at the New York Giants.

Before all the trouble started, the Saints appeared to be on a short list to face the defending Super Bowl champions. They did it last year when they opened the season in a Thursday night game at Green Bay.

Since the NFL doesn’t usually schedule division opponents in its kickoff game, the Saints likely were on a short list with the Packers and Steelers to open in New York. I’m pretty sure that list is down to just the Packers and the Steelers now and I’d guess that Green Bay is the heavy favorite. That would pit the last two Super Bowl champions against each other and you can’t ask for a better storyline.

I really don’t think the league would want to take away attention from the opening game with another big round of publicity about the bounty program. In fact, I think you could see less of the Saints, who have been a prime-time regular in recent years, in nationally-televised games.

We might find out the exact pairing for the opening game next week at the NFL meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. We likely will get the complete NFL schedule in April.

Another consequence for Saints - NFC South Blog - ESPN

I'm ok with that. How about the Hall of Fame game.

Q: This is the statement that I was referring to;

"In fact, I think you could see less of the Saints, who have been a prime-time regular in recent years, in nationally-televised games."

I live in a suburb of Dallas (the city next to Payton's new residence)...so all I get is Cowboy games....which makes me want to puke. I look so forward to nationally televised Saints games.

That would be dumb... with drama comes ratings. With ratings, comes money.

They can't be that stupid... well, nevermind.

We'll have to see how it plays out, but taking the Saints out of prime time would be impacting the profits of the networks and Tom Benson, both of whom are innocent, and there's a lot of money on the table there. I think the Saints will be scaled back from the maximum of five (which we've had for some years now) to maybe three or four prime time games, still pretty good.


And trust me -- people will be tuning in on Sunday and Monday nights to watch the "dirty Saints," for evidence of "cheating," and to rabidly criticize every tackle, hit, and play the defense makes on the internet and around the water cooler the next day. The entire nation will hate us, but that actually makes for really good television so the networks will want that. Even in their worst heyday of evilness, the Raiders were always a staple of Monday Night football and got high ratings.

I don't think we were realistically going to be on the Opening Night prime time game anyway, we've done it two years in a row now.

The pats cheated the saints did not

We may not be left with enough starters to take the field.

This is a media/ratings gold mine.

There is no bad news these days. If the NFL tried to not have the Saints in prime time... the networks will have something to say about this because its part of the contract. They have something to say about this.

Also keep in mind Blogs aren't really news its more opinions made to look like news.

If this keeps the Saints off of NFL network games then I'm all for it, that booth pairing is terrible

Longer term. What about SP to the HOF?