METAIRIE, La. -- The New Orleans Saints sent their players home Wednesday afternoon ahead of Hurricane Francine's landfall.
The Saints heeded the call of city officials to be off the roads by midafternoon because of deteriorating conditions due to the storm. The players' parking lot at the team facility was almost empty by 2 p.m. local time with rain steadily falling.
Saints coach Dennis Allen said he and his staff would stay at the facility Wednesday night hoping to resume with a normal practice day Thursday.
"We'll stay here this evening. We'll probably find a corner of the room to lay down in at some point in time and get a little bit of sleep," Allen said. "Because I think the most significant weather is gonna be this evening into the early morning hours. That's kind of when we would be trying to wrap up. I don't see anyone trying to get out of here in that type of weather."
Hurricane Francine made landfall in Morgan City, Louisiana, which is about 85 miles outside New Orleans, on Wednesday evening. The Category 2 storm had maximum sustained winds near 100 mph.
The Saints are preparing to play the Dallas Cowboys in Texas on Sunday. Linebacker Demario Davis said the team prayed for the people in the path of the storm and for everyone's safety.
"We were praying not just over ourselves, but our city and the surrounding areas through this storm," he said. "When you think about storms that continuously hit this area, it becomes kind of like a Sunday, where you can have all the predictions in the world but it's still unknown as to what's going to take place. ... You just never know, so I hope everybody's safe, everybody's hunkered down. Those that were able to get away, you're still in my prayers, as well."
The Saints did not want to evacuate for this storm and executed a plan similar to what they did for Hurricane Zeta in 2020. The coaches worked under generator power at the team facility while players were sent home early.
The Saints last evacuated for a storm ahead of Hurricane Ida in 2021. Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm on Aug. 29, 2021, knocking out power to the area for several days. The Saints chose to move their entire operation to Texas for the remainder of the preseason and the beginning of the regular season. Their home opener against the Green Bay Packers was also moved to Jacksonville, Florida, that year.
"There's a lot of things that you take into consideration when you're doing this," Allen said. "We felt like, obviously in this situation, we felt like we were going to be able to do our work and make sure we keep everybody safe, make sure that everybody's family is safe. And be able to do that and stay here. When it was Ida a few years ago, it was one of those where we didn't feel like we were going to be able to get our stuff done. We felt like people might be at risk. So we took basically the whole football operation, and families and everybody, and we went to Texas."
Allen said a decision to evacuate needed to be made quicker to feasibly pull it off. New Orleans did not issue a mandatory or voluntary evacuation for this storm.
"I think we kind of knew early on ... this was going to be a situation that we could manage," Allen said. "Now, what I didn't know was were we going to be able to get in and get our work done today? I didn't know if we were going to have to treat this like a short week and give the players off today. And then Thursday would be like we were playing on a short week and we'd have three days of practice rather than four days of practice. But after we kind of let it get to the 12th hour, we realized, 'I think this is how we can make this work.'"
Many of the players on this team never have experienced a hurricane. Quarterback Derek Carr, in his second season with the Saints, said he was there for one when he lived in Texas when he was growing up, but this is a first for him in New Orleans.
"We also understand that we do have a job to do, even when circumstances aren't perfect. We still have to focus," Carr said. "I'll be home studying tonight but I'll be doing it with all my kids sitting right next to me because this is their first time going through something like this. So they have a lot of questions, and those are real things we have to answer. When I come to work, I owe it to my teammates to be locked in and be ready to go for tomorrow. We're human but we also recognize that we have a job to do, and we also recognize that our city has been through a lot.
"Our prayers are with the whole city, the whole state of Louisiana, wherever this is passing through, and you just pray that everyone's safe. We had our players, we were praying for the city today. ... Again, we are football players but there are some things that are really important right now."