The New Orleans Saints are Under Fire Again

Some voodoo women must have put one heck of a curse on the New Orleans Saints because a bad off-season looks like it is getting a whole lot worse. With another accusation of wrong-doing being levied against the team the metaphorical levy could end up breaking any day now.

According to ESPN (and they wouldn't lie to us, right?) general manager Mickey Loomis had a special device wired into his suite at the Superdome that allowed him to listen in on communications between the opposing team's coaches. 

Go ahead. Hang your head and shake it in disbelief for a few moments.

It seems that his predecessor, Randy Mueller, had a system installed back in 2000 that allowed him to listen into the Saints coaches on game day. The contention is that Loomis had the system rewired so that it could listen in on the opposition, and he used it from 2002-04.

Go ahead; shake your head in disbelief again.

What good it could do remains to be seen. There has been a lot of talk that the signals were wireless and encrypted; that they'd be useless to Loomis even if he could get ahold of them. It's also been said that not everything on game day is wireless, but that some elements of a team's communication system is hard-wired (which he could have tapped).

This could not come at a worse time for the Saints. The team appears to have come to grips with losing Sean Payton for the year. Joe Vitt has been tabbed to run the team, but it is not clear yet who is going to do it while he's serving a six-game suspension.

There is still the matter at what punishment that the league is going to hand down to the 20 or so players that the league claims were involved in the bounty-gate scandal. Lately quarterback Drew Brees and other players have spoken out saying that the league has yet to provide irrefutable evidence of who was involved.

As quickly as the punishments were handed down for Loomis, Payton, and Vitt, it is a little surprising that the league has taken so long to do anything about the players. The only logical explanation is that there must be something to the argument that Brees has put forth.

For now it appears that the Saints are set to fight this latest problem. The team has already publicly stated that the accusations are not only false, but they are 1000 percent false." Should ESPN not be able to back up these claims (the source currently remains anonymous) the Saints could have a pretty good civil case against the network.

Article by Travis Pulver