Payton on being one of the least injured teams in the NFL

Elvis said

And it does go back to the Payton years for sure. I remember the days when a player would come up limping and it was almost automatically going to be a month before they diagnosed a sports hernia and off they went for surgery.


He's been gone for years now and they have not stopped, but they have in Denver. So my guess is those Ochsner sponsorship dollars aren't under the control of the head coach.

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Ochsner has nothing to do with the team's strength and conditioning program. It's mostly just a sponsorship deal. Yes they use doctors from Ochsner, but at this point, most of the doctors in this area work for a hospital owned by Ochsner. I mean the deal with Raisin' Cane as the official chicken finger of the New Orleans Saints doesn't mean all the players eat is Rasin' Canes.

We already know the reason for some of the soft tissue injuries is that DA made warmups optional. The other factors are likely that we have a lot of old players and we play at least 10 games per year on field turf and practice a lot on field turf which I believe that there are studies that show there are more injuries on field turf than grass. Plus, if players have injuries they will fly them all over the country to be treated by the top guys in the field.

Anyway, I don't think Payton was commenting on the Saints and if he did see something being done here that he thought was leading to injuries in his 15 years here, he damn sure would have changed it. And, if it was Ochsner, he would have gone to Mrs. Benson and got her to get out of that deal. But, I mean, Ochsner is now part of the James Andrews Sports Medicine Institute.