Who Dat History: The 1987 Season (1 Viewer)

[the-commish]

Woulda coulda shoulda

Mora Coulda Woulda Shoulda - YouTube

9 game winning streak after above press conference

That 9 game win streak included a 26-24 win over the 49ers at San Francisco, when Morten Andersen kicked a game winning FG with less than 30 seconds left in the game. In fact, the Saints played at Atlanta, at L.A. Rams, and at San Francisco in consecutive weeks, and won all three. Those teams were the other teams comprising the NFC West at the time.

 

[primadox]

1987 was the first year I had season tickets since I was a child and my parents had them at Tulane Stadium. I had just gotten married in July and season tickets were a prerequisite to marriage.

 

[saintsfan26]

Here is Part 1 of the story:

Who Dat History: The 1987 Season - Same Old Saints? - Canal Street Chronicles

The Saints opened the season by hosting the Cleveland Browns, and the Saints won a thriller, 28-21, outlasting a Hail Mary attempt at the final gun (this script would be flipped 12 years later, in Ditka's final season with the team, but that's another story for another time.). This was a crazy win because the 1987 Browns were led by Bernie Kosar and would head to their second consecutive heart breaking defeat in the AFC championship in the playoffs. They were an elite team.

Oh, did I mention the Saints had only won three season openers before 1987? And that's despite 17 of those 20 games being HOME OPENERS. That's so pathetic, and is probably one reason the game didn't sell out and was blacked out locally. A crowd of 59,900 watched Bobby Hebert throw two scores to Hoby Brenner and the defense get two safeties.

The guy did his homework on this story that's for sure. Very good story so far, and its just the beginning.

 

[Buhbooh]

Weird season. The scab games screwed the standings up. The Niners' scabs went 3-0, the Saints' scabs went 2-1, and the Vikings' scabs went 0-3 - so the Vikings had a deceptive 8-7 record, and they, of course, preceded to knock the Saints and Niners out of the playoffs.

A Vikings hail-mary TD at the end of the first half did the Saints in.

 

[UFCSaint]

I grew up on the Gulf Coast and followed the Saints from the late 70's all the way up to 1986....when I moved away. I remember living in Tennessee in 1987 and my brother calling me to tell me that they might finally have a good team.

 

[Changeling]

I went to the opener that year (Cleveland), and you could just tell then that this Saints team was not like teams of the past. A huge improvement from even the year before, much less the horrible teams in the 70s and early 80s.
And as much as it hurt losing that WC game to the Vikings, they were just peaking at the right time. I watched that game on tv and thought "Frisco is gonna get killed by this team." Next week, Minny waxed the Niners just about as bad as they clocked the Saints. The eventual SB winner Redskins finally took care of Minnesota (at least, that's what I remember), and they proved they were the best team in the NFC. If the Saints had won that WC game (or if they had somehow gotten a different draw than Minny in rd 1), I don't think they would have been able to beat Wash down the road anyway. Hell, could they have beaten Frisco in a rematch at Candlestick? MAYBE, but that is no sure thing.
87 Saints was the beginning of a much better franchise for NO, and even if they never won a playoff game under Mora, I'll always remember his late 80s-early 90s teams fondly.

 

[Saintshizzle]

Man, that seems like 100 years ago, song and all. I was in college up the road in Natchitoches, tix were cheap, actually got some free from various organizations on campus.

 

[GTSaint]

Weird season. The scab games screwed the standings up. The Niners' scabs went 3-0, the Saints' scabs went 2-1, and the Vikings' scabs went 0-3 - so the Vikings had a deceptive 8-7 record, and they, of course, preceded to knock the Saints and Niners out of the playoffs.

A Vikings hail-mary TD at the end of the first half did the Saints in.

The 49ers had the benefit of their starting quarterback - Joe Montana - for all 3 of those "scab" games, so of course they won all of them.
My girlfriend (at the time) and I spent the night outside of the dome in line to buy playoff tickets.

 

[pearlms]

I still have vcr tapes starting with the game in Atlanta where the Saints intercepted Scott Campball 5 times. Moses came out on the field after Mel Gray had a rushing touchdown.

 

[Saints 4 life]

Our '87 unis. Simply the BEST!

 

[Quiet_Storm]

I was too young to remember this, so I'm loving the history. Most of what I heard about this season revolved around the playoff loss to the Vikings, so I didn't realize how much else happened this season. Very well done series of articles!

 

[cki3915]

Good article, but I think that the Prologue judges the fanbase a little too harshly. He takes issue that people think that the Who Dat Nation has filled the Superdome/Tulane Stadium every year through thick and thin regardless of the team's record.

The problem is that no one makes that assumption. Everyone knows that consistent sellouts is a recent phenomena. We didn't sell the season out on a season ticket basis untill 2006. Even during the years that the Mora teams and the Haslett teams were good, selling out the dome was a week by week thing for the most part. When the team was bad, the dome was not full.

He never actually comes out and says it, but the impression I got from this section is that he is questioning the whole notion of the Saints fanbase being a truely passionate one.

First of all, consistent NFL sellouts was not the norm back in those days. A few teams were lucky enough to have this, but for the most part, the run of the mill NFL team had to fill its home week by week, and failed much more often than they do now. The season ticket waiting list thing? Back in those days, very few teams had one of those. More teams have it now. Today, only a few teams have blackouts in a year. Back in the 70s and 80s, only a few teams didn't have at least one blackout.

Second, to correlate the football viewing habits of his 11 and 12 year old friends to the passion of our fanbase is pretty petty. He says that only 45% of his friends cared about the Saints, then he adds that kids tend to be bandwagon fans. Well, duh. Then why mention it?

He pretty much hits the poitn on a sentence that he writes as almost of a throwaway:

"Now if you want to tell me that considering how awful the Saints were, they were lucky anybody showed up at all, I'd agree with you."

You also have to consider the economy. The late 70s was the Carter era. Here in Louisiana the early and mid 80s was the Oil Bust. There wasn't a whole lot of spare capital around to go to football games. Tampa is going through a similar thing right now.

So I just object to the nonwritten suggestion that our fans are not as passionate as we think they are due to attendence back in the day.

 

[MGC]

I was in Hawaii for a job assignment that season. Saints were on TV quite a lot that year so I got to see most of the games. I swear in the playoff game againts the Queens they knew what play we were running and the snap count. Their DL was moving the instant the ball was snapped. Up 7-0 then the roof caved in.

 

[Mr. Blue Sky]

13 yrs old.. Had just moved away from New Orleans for the first time in my young life, to Florida, in the summer of 1987.. Occupied myself with going to the cinema to see movies like Cant Buy Me Love, Adventures in Babysitting and La Bamba, waiting for my first year of high school to start -- then the '87 season happened. After growing up going to games in the Dome all my life, this season-- a *winning* season-- felt like winning the Super Bowl.. My aunt would send me cassette tapes of local NOLA radio station B97FM that she had recorded with them talking about the previous weekend's game, and playing the anthems that others have mentioned, like Im a Believer and Go Saints All the Way (which i too have on my iPod and enjoy listening to while running, over a quarter century later).. The one word i would use to sum up that season would be.. Special. It was just a special season, knowing that we, the Saints, could actually be contenders.. Of course, i never would have thought back then that i'd have to wait over 20 more years for a Super Bowl appearance-- but that doesnt diminish the specialness of that 1987 year.

 

[RickKoper]

I was 20 and in the USMC in 1987 and I remember that season vividly. The article is a good read, but he is way off base with his estimate of saints fans' bandwagon mentality. While we may not have sold out the dome very often, if you look at the attendance numbers, there were plenty of people buying tickets and plenty of hard core saints fans saying "Just wait until next year."

I honestly didn't know a single soul in the city that wasn't a saints fan.... of course, I still don't know anyone that lives here that isn't a saints fan.