Saints staff hunkering down in team facility during Hurricane Francine

The New Orleans Saints are bracing for Hurricane Francine.

Saints head coach Dennis Allen said he released his players early on Wednesday ahead of Hurricane Francine’s scheduled landfall as a Category 2 storm in southern Louisiana. However, Allen revealed that he and his staff will hunker down in the team’s facilities in an attempt to weather the storm.

‘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,’ said Allen Wednesday. ‘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.’

The Saints are scheduled to face the Dallas Cowboys in Texas on Sunday.

Allen said the Saints’ staff made the decision not to evacuate after careful consideration: ‘We kind of knew early on … this was going to be a situation that we could manage… 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.’

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Allen said the team makes the decision whether to evacuate or not on a case-by-case basis. Ahead of Hurricane Ida’s landfall in 2021, for example, Saints players, staff and family members safely evacuated to Texas before the Category 4 hurricane touched down. The team’s home opener against the Green Bay Packers was relocated to the Jacksonville Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium as a result of the storm.

‘When it was (Hurricane) 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,’ explained Allen, who was the team’s defensive coordinator at the time. ‘So we took basically the whole football operation, and families and everybody, and we went to Texas.’

Quarterback Derek Carr said he prays ‘that everyone’s safe.’

‘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,’ said Carr, who is experiencing his first Hurricane in his second year in New Orleans. ‘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.

Francine made landfall in the Parish of Terrebonne, about 30 miles south-southwest of Morgan City, the National Hurricane Center announced at 5 p.m. CDT. Maximum sustained winds were estimated to be near 100 mph.

Francine’s sustained winds dropped to 90 mph by 6 p.m. CDT, and the storm was expected to continue battering the central Louisiana coast on Wednesday evening. ‘Conditions are beginning to deteriorate in southern Louisiana,’ the center said Wednesday afternoon.