re: Saints 34 @ Packers 42 l FINAL l

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How big of a challenge do you think this game is against Green Bay?
“These are fun games. Last year, everybody was talking about the same thing and this same setting last year. When you play in championship games, you play in playoff games, and you get a chance to start the season off, those are always fun games. It’s really from a challenging standpoint, this is the first game of a long season. One of the things that I think our head coach does a great job around here doing this is you have to prepare for other distractions. There are all of a sudden a lot more of you guys around in games like this. There’s going to be a longer pregame. There’s going to be longer television timeouts to sell commercials. You have to do all those types of things, those are all distractions to the players. People came to watch these guys play, but there’s going to be a big production around these guys. Our guys have to be able to block those distractions out just like everything else.”

Last year you blitzed more than any team in the league on third down, and Aaron Rodgers ranked at the top of the league against the blitz. How do you prepare for that?
“Quite truthfully, for the entire season because who do those stats don’t know when we’re blitzing on the run and so they have no idea that those run blitzes were a call too. What we’ll have to do is we’ll have to take our calculated chances, but that’s the way we play. That’s like all of a sudden telling Mike McCarthy to take the air out of the ball and run it all the time. He’s not going to do that and we’re not going to do it either. We’re going to have to play our way and we’re going to have to pick our times to do it and understand what we’re telling the quarterback when that happens. It’ll be a fun game. It’s the same thing when they do it against us. Dom Capers, for anybody to say he’s not going to pressure, Drew Brees knows that and he’s going to have to try to find a big play, we’re going to have to try to find a big play. It’s going to come down to who does the best job at protecting the football.”

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With training camp and four preseason contests in the books, the New Orleans Saints will open the NFL season under the NFL’s brightest spotlight. The Super Bowl XLIV Champions New Orleans Saints will travel to Lambeau Field to face the Green Bay Packers, who captured Super Bowl XLV. The contest will be nationally televised on NBC with a 7:30 p.m. kickoff.

“To open the season in a primetime game against last year’s Super Bowl winner, and it happens to be in Lambeau Field, there are a lot of things that gets your competitive juices flowing,” said Head Coach Sean Payton. “It will be a tough environment. It’ll be a really good challenge and you have to take into account you’re playing a team that won the Super Bowl last year. All of those are things that we’ll feel and we’ll see and recognize as being a big challenge.”

The Saints will be kicking off the NFL season for the third time in the last five seasons. It marks the first time since 2007, when they opened the league’s season at Indianapolis that they will start the season away from the Louisiana Superdome.

The Saints have been able to get off to fast starts in their season openers under head coach Sean Payton, posting a 4-1 mark, while not losing to open a season since 2007. The Saints have won three consecutive season openers for the first time in club history.

Thursday night’s matchup will mark a meeting between the two most successful franchises in the NFC since the 2006 season. In addition to the Saints and Packers being the last two Super Bowl champions, Saints head coach Sean Payton and Green Bay head coach Mike McCarthy, both call plays for the only two clubs to finish in the top 10 offensively each of the last five seasons. Since both coaches have been hired in 2006, Payton has posted a 53-33 overall record, while McCarthy, who coordinated the New Orleans offense from 2000-04, has a 53-34 mark.

Both clubs have also featured aggressive attacking defenses since the hiring of Gregg Williams and Dom Capers as coordinators in 2009. New Orleans finished the 2010 season ranked fourth overall defensively, while the Packers were just one spot behind the Saints at fifth.

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