







When it comes to New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons, the rivalry doesn't start with the opening kickoff. No, it begins the moment the visiting team arrives in enemy territory. And if this week is any indication, Thursday night's game ought to be a beauty.

Wednesday night, the Saints had deplaned at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta and were boarding their team bus when they experienced a new kind of heckling: eggs. Seriously. Airport workers were throwing eggs at them. Saints players responded quickly on Twitter:

"Guess they really do hate us!" tweeted backup QB Chase Daniel.

"Classy!" added tight end Jimmy Graham.

EggGate is now the latest salvo in what's fast becoming one of the NFL's most compelling rivalries, a battle both on field and off. Appropriately enough for its Southern locale, it's the rivalry that most resembles college football, where attitude and personality play key roles, and where everyone – fan and player alike – is a combatant.





For most of their shared half-century of existence, the rivalry between the Falcons and the Saints has been the NFL equivalent of kittens tussling over a strand of yarn – cute, but utterly inconsequential.

Oh, sure, there were flashes, as one team or the other bubbled up in the standings for a year or so. But for most of their long history, the Saints and the Falcons have been unenviable icons of football futility.

The teams arrived in the NFL within a year of each other, twin outposts in a then-untapped New South, and for most of their existence have been little more than warm-weather stops and guaranteed W's on the schedules of old-school franchises. Even though both teams, and their fans, always treated their two annual meetings as must-win bloodsport, you could feel the sarcasm oozing out of Pittsburgh and Dallas and Chicago: Those two teams hate each other? That's just precious.

A serious rivalry is one so intense that fans who don't even have skin in the game envy the matchup. You may loathe both the Redskins and the Cowboys, but if you're a fan of, say, the Jaguars or the Chargers, you can't deny a twinge of jealousy at the fact you don't have anybody that hates you quite that much. Outside of their weather (Atlanta) and sanctioned debauchery (New Orleans), nobody has cast an envious eye at the NFC South in quite some time.

But change is afoot. As the teams prepare for a Thursday night battle that has playoff implications for New Orleans and self-respect implications for Atlanta, it's worth taking a look back at the rivalry's high points (it won't take long) and its bright, if mouthy, future.

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The teams have met only once in the postseason, a 1991 wild-card matchup that Atlanta won. Over 46 years, they've almost split their 86 regular-season meetings (Atlanta has won 45, New Orleans 41), a record that's perfectly appropriate in its zero-ground-gained balance.

Without a doubt, the most significant game between the two teams occurred in 2006, as it was the first game played in the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. That was, at the time, the most-watched game in ESPN's history; it featured everyone from U2 and Green Day in a pregame concert to President George W. Bush conducting the opening coin toss. The Saints demolished the Falcons 23-3, beginning with a blocked-punt/touchdown just minutes into the game.

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