Report: NFL considering ‘significant discipline’ for Saints after postgame celebration

Here’s your weekly Sunday morning splash report: ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports that the New Orleans Saints are facing harsh penalties from the league for breaches of COVID-19 protocol after Week 9’s blowout win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in which Saints coach Sean Payton joined his players for a brief celebration before showering and changing minutes after the game.

Per Schefter’s report — which follows days of dialogue between the league office and the Saints legal team — the bigger issue is that the Saints would be considered repeat offenders, similarly to the Las Vegas Raiders. Both teams and their head coaches were fined after failing to properly wear face coverings during their Week 2 prime-time game, but the similarities in their offenses fall apart after about two minutes’ consideration.

The second break in protocol for the Raiders was the admittance of a non-credentialed employee to their locker room following Week 2’s win over the Saints. Additionally, the NFL went after the Raiders for repeated breaches of protocol, including a charity fundraiser appearance by ten players in which none of them wore masks, and for right tackle Trent Brown’s failure to wear contact tracing devices at the team facility.

Brown later tested positive for COVID-19, forcing the other four starting offensive linemen to self-quarantine out of an abundance of caution. It resulted in a Raiders-Buccaneers game getting flexed out of Sunday night’s time slot to accommodate the losses, and substantial penalties to the Raiders organization: $500,000 in fines and a loss of a 2021 sixth-round draft pick.

To be clear: what the Saints have done doesn’t compare to this. Not even a little bit. To suggest as much would be an awful false equivalence. The Raiders were negligent inside and outside their home facility, breaching the “mini-bubble” of the locker room, and they’ve rightfully had the hammer drop down on them. They’ve also been without several players as they recover from infection, directly caused by that negligence.

The Saints have had two positive cases all season: backup running back Dwayne Washington spent nearly three weeks on the reserve list to start the season, and wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders missed two weeks after catching COVID-19 at home. Neither situation resulted in an outbreak like what the Raiders and other teams (like the Tennessee Titans, who gathered for practices away from the facility when it was closed because of infections) have experienced.

Saints owner Gayle Benson has rented out entire hotels for the team to isolate themselves in during road games, including this visit to Tampa Bay, and they’ve chartered private flights on oversized aircraft to allow for more social distancing in transit. They’ve taken this more seriously than most, and a few minutes of dancing and shouting in celebration — after hours of playing a high-contact sport — doesn’t change that.

And, yeah: the Saints weren’t the only team to celebrate like this recently. The Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo Bills, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Detroit Lions have all shared videos of shenanigans exactly mirroring what the Saints have done. If the NFL is going to point to the Raiders’ serious offenses as enough precedent to dock future draft picks and cash from the Saints, they’ll be doing so off of a very, very flimsy argument. But when has the league office made an example out of the Saints before?

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