Monday night, 10 years and a day since he walked into the Superdome in New Orleans under the cover of Michael Vick’s shadow, Matt Schaub will make the same entrance as Matt Ryan’s back-up.
As is custom whenever the Falcons play the Saints in this heated intra-division rivalry, emotions will be running in the red.
But back then, on the night they reopened the dome as a place for football rather than a hellish refuge of last resort, the passions inside rose as flood waters that could have matched those of Hurricane Katrina herself. Back then, as the Falcons prepared to meet this irresistible force, they wondered how they would manage to function, much less win.
Basically, they couldn’t.
And they didn’t.
The Falcons equipment people had Vick and Schaub try ear plugs. They tried covering the earholes in their helmets. “Whatever you could do to minimize the outside noise and amplify what we hear in our headset,” Schaub remembered. They expected it to be loud on the night New Orleans returned to the business of professional football after Katrina. But nothing quite like the constant roar that met them.
They might as well have tried to hold back time and tide.
“Nothing was working,” Schaub said. “We tried it in practice — and thought, oh, that could work. But we got out there in warm-ups and said this isn’t going to work. We have to just get rid of all this and just go play.”
Monday night, a decade and a day since he sat in the apartment his family had settled in after being evicted by Katrina, joyfully watching the Saints roll over the Falcons, Deion Jones will be right in the middle of this rivalry. Only now he’s playing linebacker for the visitors.
By that point of 2006, the 11 year old Jones had been moved from Mississippi to Texas and finally back home in the little more than a year since the hurricane had devastated New Orleans. His grandmother had sheltered in the very dome that had reeked of mold and desperation. Now it was returned as a centerpiece of celebration, a symbol of a community on the mend.
“It meant a lot, especially with all the stuff that happened in the Superdome. People saying the Superdome might never get back to the condition it was before. To have it back open and playing football in there again, it was great,” Jones said recently.
The curious orbits that football men do make will bring the veteran and the rookie back around to the scene of what was the most deeply meaningful football game of the time.
It is fitting that the Falcons are the opponent on the 10th Anniversary of the Superdome’s reopening, since they had so dutifully cooperated with the plot of Sept. 25, 2006, losing 23-3. Years ago one former Saint said he remembered that the Falcons were in an impossible position, faced with an assignment that was “like trying to fight destiny.” Which remains undefeated to this day.
This week the Falcons must depend on the passage of the years to steal away much of the emotional advantage the Saints fed off a decade ago. They must hope that whatever the remembrance will be Monday night, it will be but a dim echo of ’06.
Otherwise, they have no chance. Just as they had no chance then.
To know why New Orleans was so loud and so proud that night, think of the Joneses’ story and multiply by the tens of thousands.
Watching Katrina churn in the gulf and gain intensity in late August 2005, Cal Jones made the canny choice to evacuate, packing up his wife Tahonas and their one child Deion and heading for the home of his wife’s mother in Mississippi. Cal’s mother, though, would not be budged. For her stubbornness she’d be sentenced to a temporary stay inside the dangerous, damaged, fetid Superdome, until days later being bussed to Texas.
To a kid, it seemed only a brief inconvenience. “It was the start of (youth) football season. All the friends I had on the team, we thought we’d be right back to playing in no time. And that didn’t happen,” Deion said.
What followed was a rootless six months, as the family went from Mississippi to Houston where they reunited with Deion’s fraternal grandmother Montrell. And then on to Dallas. There were great misgivings about ever returning to New Orleans. But when Montrell fell ill and died, the family took her home to be buried. And they decided to stay. A cab driver before Katrina, Cal Jones would repurpose himself as an air conditioning technician. And Deion would go on to play football at LSU, and get himself drafted by the rival Falcons in the second round of the 2016 draft.
The Saints would spend the 2005 season as gypsies, too, playing “home” games in San Antonio and Baton Rouge as the wounded Superdome underwent $185 million in repairs.
Some believed the place was beyond salvage. Some had a difficult time envisioning the rituals of normalcy returning to New Orleans. So it was by the time the Saints moved back into their home dome to face the Falcons the place was primed for an almost nuclear triumphant release.
This was the ultimate homecoming game.
The dome was packed to the ceiling, and ESPN viewership would reach more than 15 million, a record high at the time. U2 and Green Day played during the pregame. Former president George H.W. Bush commanded the coin flip.
“It didn’t quiet down one second in that game from start to finish,” Schaub said. “Even during TV timeouts, the noise level and energy level inside that stadium was something I had never been a part of — up until that point and since that point.”
And just 90 seconds into the game, when the Saints blocked a punt and recovered it for a touchdown, that noise began jackhammering its way into bone marrow.
Said defensive lineman Jonathan Babineaux, the only other Falcon from 2006 still on the team: “We definitely didn’t play to our standard that day as far as I could remember. Those guys had a lot going on for them that day.”
Schaub’s career wound from Atlanta to Houston to Oakland to Baltimore and back to Atlanta. How many losses along the way could he look back on and rightfully say, “That moment, that game, I’ll always remember. It’s one of the significant occurrences in your life.”
Destiny is not just the name of a Bourbon Street stripper. The Falcons discovered as much 10 years ago, being overmatched against something insurmountable that raucous night. As for the Monday night upcoming, they hope to have only the Saints on the schedule.
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