Saints partner up with European football team coached by former player Jack Del Rio
Saints partner up with European football team coached by former player Jack Del Rio Move lays the groundwork for a Saints game in France as soon as 2026
This is worth watching. on Wednesday, the New Orleans Saints announced that they have agreed to a "strategic international partnership to grow American football in Europe" with the Paris Musketeers, the latest union between the NFL and the European League of Football (ELF).
Saints president Dennis Lauscha spoke about the move in a statement from the team: "We are proud to announce our partnership with the Paris Musketeers, a collaboration that reflects our ongoing commitment to growing the game of football globally. This strategic alliance provides a valuable opportunity to expand the reach of the Saints brand, engage with the French audience, and share the rich tradition and passion of our organization with fans around the world."
Founded in 2022, the Musketeers went 6-6 in their inaugural season before improving to 10-2 last year, coached by Marc Mattioli; he was hired as the defensive coordinator at Kennesaw State in the fall and replaced by longtime NFL coach Jack Del Rio, whose playing career started with the Saints back in 1985. After he hung up his cleats and took up coaching, Del Rio was hired by then-Saints head coach Mike Ditka in 1997. The Musketeers' regular season kicks off on May 17 from Stade Robert Bobin in Bondoufle, just south of Paris.
Musketeers CEO John McKeon also shared a statement on the occasion: "Joining forces with the New Orleans Saints is a significant milestone for our organization. We look forward to collaborating on initiatives that will not only enhance the fan experience but also contribute to the development of American football in France and beyond. One of our first joint initiatives will be the launch of a halftime flag football series with local youth groups at our home games this season."
The Saints have been awarded exclusive marketing rights in France, and signs point to them playing a regular season game in the country as soon as 2026; partnering up with a team based out of the nation's capital would go a long way to start developing a following abroad. There are many historic and cultural ties between France and Louisiana so this does stand out as one of the more obvious partnerships the NFL has launched overseas. Stay tuned for details on which events and promotions the Saints and Musketeers are planning.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
31 minutes ago
- USA Today
Noah Lyles vs. Tyreek Hill race would be good for TV, but not competitive on the track
A few days after Xavier Worthy broke the NFL combine 40-yard dash record, USA TODAY Sports sarcastically asked the then-draft prospect if he thought he could beat Usain Bolt in the 40-yard dash. Bolt, the former Jamaican track and field superstar, eight-time Olympic gold medalist, and 100- and 200-meter world-record holder, effortlessly ran a 4.22 in the 40-yard dash in sweats and sneakers at the NFL Experience in 2019. Worthy clocked in with an NFL combine record-setting time of 4.21 at the 2024 NFL scouting combine. 'No,' Worthy answered when asked if he could beat Bolt. 'His 40 was in shoes and sweats. There's no comparison. I'm not even gonna disrespect him.' MORE: What is the fastest NFL combine 40-yard dash time? Worthy's honest assessment applies to Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill, too. Hill and Olympic 100-meter champion Noah Lyles have playfully gone back and forth about competing against each other in a race. Their scheduled race was canceled in June due to what Lyles described as "complications" and "personal reasons." The race would've been good publicity for both athletes and brought more casual fans to the sport of track and field. But let's stop the charade. Hill is not in the same league as Lyles or any world-class sprinter when it comes to speed. Hill did beat Lyles' younger brother, Josephus, in a 100 prelim at the ATX Sprint Classic on Saturday with a wind-aided time of 10.10. Hill conveniently elected not to run in the final, where the top five finishers all ran sub-10 seconds (all times were wind-aided). Hill, who competed in track and field in college, has a personal best legal time of 10.15 seconds in the 100 meters. The Dolphins wideout would've placed ninth at the 2024 U.S. Olympic track and field trials if he equaled his record. Hill's top mark in the 60 is 6.64. His record in the 60 would've been good enough for eighth in the event at the 2025 U.S. Indoor track and field championships. Noah won a gold medal in the 100 at the Paris Olympics with a personal-best of 9.79. His lifetime best in the 60 is 6.43. Both times are comfortably ahead of Hill's all-time best marks. Furthermore, Noah's 10 best times in the 100 are sub-9.90. His top 10 times in the 60 are all 6.55 or better. All of which are faster than Hill's lifetime best in both events. The times don't lie. They reveal the obvious truth. Yes, the Noah Lyles vs. Tyreek Hill showdown would've been entertaining for sports fans. They are two of the biggest stars in their respective sports. But it wouldn't have been a competitive race. Hill is arguably the fastest person in the NFL (although Worthy might have something to say about that). Lyles currently holds the title of the fastest man in the world, having won the Olympic gold medal in the 100. They are marquee athletes, but there's a distinct difference between football speed and world-class track speed. Follow USA TODAY Sports' Tyler Dragon on X @TheTylerDragon.
Atlantic
41 minutes ago
- Atlantic
How to Assess the Damage of the Iran Strikes
In August 1941, the British government received a very unwelcome piece of analysis from an economist named David Miles Bensusan-Butt. A careful analysis of photographs suggested that the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command was having trouble hitting targets in Germany and France; in fact, only one in three pilots that claimed to have attacked the targets seemed to have dropped its bombs within five miles of them. The Butt report is a landmark in the history of 'bomb damage assessment,' or, as we now call it, 'battle damage assessment.' This recondite term has come back into public usage because of the dispute over the effectiveness of the June 22 American bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities. President Donald Trump said that American bombs had 'obliterated' the Iranian nuclear program. A leaked preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency on June 24 said that the damage was minimal. Whom to believe? Have the advocates of bombing again overpromised and underdelivered? Some history is in order here, informed by a bit of personal experience. From 1991 to 1993 I ran the U.S. Air Force's study of the first Gulf War. In doing so I learned that BDA rests on three considerations: the munition used, including its accuracy; the aircraft delivering it; and the type of damage or effect created. Of these, precision is the most important. World War II saw the first use of guided bombs in combat. In September 1943, the Germans used radio-controlled glide bombs to sink the Italian battleship Roma as it sailed off to surrender to the Allies. Americans developed similar systems with some successes, though none so dramatic. In the years after the war, precision-guided weapons slowly came to predominate in modern arsenals. The United States used no fewer than 24,000 laser-guided bombs during the Vietnam War, and some 17,000 of them during the 1991 Gulf War. These weapons have improved considerably, and in the 35 years since, 'routine precision,' as some have called it, has enormously improved the ability of airplanes to hit hard, buried targets. Specially designed ordnance has also seen tremendous advances. In World War II, the British developed the six-ton Tallboy bomb to use against special targets, including the concrete submarine pens of occupied France in which German U-boats hid. The Tallboys cracked some of the concrete but did not destroy any, in part because these were 'dumb bombs' lacking precision guidance, and in part because the art of hardening warheads was in its infancy. In the first Gulf War, the United States hastily developed a deep-penetrating, bunker-busting bomb, the GBU-28, which weighed 5,000 pounds, but only two were used, to uncertain effect. In the years since, however, the U.S. and Israeli air forces, among others, have acquired hardened warheads for 2,000-pound bombs such as the BLU-109 that can hit deeply buried targets—which is why, for example, the Israelis were able to kill a lot of Hezbollah's leadership in its supposedly secure bunkers. The aircraft that deliver bombs can affect the explosives' accuracy. Bombs that home in on the reflection of a laser, for example, could become 'stupid' if a cloud passes between plane and the target, or if the laser otherwise loses its lock on the target. Bombs relying on GPS coordinates can in theory be jammed. Airplanes being shot at are usually less effective bomb droppers than those that are not, because evasive maneuvers can prevent accurate delivery. The really complicated question is that of effects. Vietnam-era guided bombs, for example, could and did drop bridges in North Vietnam. In many cases, however, Vietnamese engineers countered by building 'underwater bridges' that allowed trucks to drive across a river while axle-deep in water. The effect was inconvenience, not interdiction. Conversely, in the first Gulf War, the U.S. and its allies spent a month pounding Iraqi forces dug in along the Kuwait border, chiefly with dumb bombs delivered by 'smart aircraft' such as the F-16. In theory, the accuracy of the bombing computer on the airplane would allow it to deliver unguided ordnance with accuracy comparable to that of a laser-guided bomb. In practice, ground fire and delivery from high altitudes often caused pilots to miss. When teams began looking at Iraqi tanks in the area overrun by U.S. forces, they found that many of the tanks were, in fact, undamaged. But that was only half of the story. Iraqi tank crews were so sufficiently terrified of American air power that they stayed some distance away from their tanks, and tanks immobilized and unmaintained for a month, or bounced around by near-misses, do not work terribly well. The functional and indirect effects of the bombing, in other words, were much greater than the disappointing physical effects. Many of the critiques of bombing neglect the importance of this phenomenon. The pounding of German cities and industry during World War II, for example, did not bring war production to a halt until the last months, but the indirect and functional effects were enormous. The diversion of German resources into air-defense and revenge weapons, and the destruction of the Luftwaffe's fighter force over the Third Reich, played a very great role in paving the way to Allied victory. At a microlevel, BDA can be perplexing. In 1991, for example, a bomb hole in an Iraqi hardened-aircraft shelter told analysts only so much. Did the bomb go through the multiple layers of concrete and rock fill, or did it 'J-hook'back upward and possibly fail to explode? Was there something in the shelter when it hit, and what damage did it do? Did the Iraqis perhaps move airplanes into penetrated shelters on the theory that lightning would not strike twice? All hard (though not entirely impossible) to judge without being on the ground. To the present moment: BDA takes a long time, so the leaked DIA memo of June 24 was based on preliminary and incomplete data. The study I headed was still working on BDA a year after the war ended. Results may be quicker now, but all kinds of information need to be integrated—imagery analysis, intercepted communications, measurement and signature intelligence (e.g., subsidence of earth above a collapsed structure), and of course human intelligence, among others. Any expert (and any journalist who bothered to consult one) would know that two days was a radically inadequate time frame in which to form a considered judgment. The DIA report was, from a practical point of view, worthless. An educated guess, however, would suggest that in fact the U.S. military's judgment that the Iranian nuclear problem had suffered severe damage was correct. The American bombing was the culmination of a 12-day campaign launched by the Israelis, which hit many nuclear facilities and assassinated at least 14 nuclear scientists. The real issue is not the single American strike so much as the cumulative effect against the entire nuclear ecosystem, including machining, testing, and design facilities. The platforms delivering the munitions in the American attack had ideal conditions in which to operate—there was no Iranian air force to come up and attack the B-2s that they may not even have detected, nor was there ground fire to speak of. The planes were the most sophisticated platforms of the most sophisticated air force in the world. The bombs themselves, particularly the 14 GBU-57s, were gigantic—at 15 tons more than double the size of Tallboys—with exquisite guidance and hardened penetrating warheads. The targets were all fully understood from more than a decade of close scrutiny by Israeli and American intelligence, and probably that of other Western countries as well. In the absence of full information, cumulative expert judgment also deserves some consideration—and external experts such as David Albright, the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, have concluded that the damage was indeed massive and lasting. Israeli analysts, in and out of government, appear to agree. They are more likely to know, and more likely to be cautious in declaring success about what is, after all, an existential threat to their country. For that matter, the Iranian foreign minister concedes that 'serious damage' was done. One has to set aside the sycophantic braggadocio of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who seems to believe that one unopposed bombing raid is a military achievement on par with D-Day, or the exuberant use of the word obliteration by the president. A cooler, admittedly provisional judgment is that with all their faults, however, the president and his secretary of defense are likely a lot closer to the mark about what happened when the bombs fell than many of their hasty, and not always well-informed, critics. *Photo-illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Alberto Pizzoli / Sygma / Getty; MIKE NELSON / AFP / Getty; Greg Mathieson / Mai / Getty; Space Frontiers / Archive Photos / Hulton Archive / Getty; U.S. Department of Defense
Newsweek
44 minutes ago
- Newsweek
NFL Star Makes Shocking Statement on Philadelphia Eagles Fans
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Following his first NFL season, Los Angeles Rams defensive end Jared Verse came away with an unexpected take. The young pass rusher believes the Philadelphia Eagles has the best fans that don't root for the Rams. Quite the change of tune for the 24-year-old out of Florida State. "I got to give them that," Verse said on 'Whistle.' "I like when you kind of get into it. You're aggressive, you're loud, and all of that stuff. They stand by that, no doubt." Ahead of an Eagles-Rams clash in the 2025 NFC Divisional Round, Verse wasn't as complimentary to Philly fans. In fact, he claimed to have a hatred for them. "I hate Eagles fans," Verse stated. "They're so annoying. I hate Eagles fans." Despite not playing in front of Eagles fans outside of Los Angeles yet at the time, perhaps Verse got an idea of what they were like back when he lived in Pennsylvania during his earlier years. Running back Saquon Barkley #26 of the Philadelphia Eagles and linebacker Jared Verse #8 of the Los Angeles Rams interact after an NFL football game, at SoFi Stadium on November 24, 2024 in Inglewood, California.... Running back Saquon Barkley #26 of the Philadelphia Eagles and linebacker Jared Verse #8 of the Los Angeles Rams interact after an NFL football game, at SoFi Stadium on November 24, 2024 in Inglewood, California. MoreHe gave the Eagles and their fan base perfect bulletin board material ahead of an intense playoff matchup at Lincoln Financial Field. What started out as a cold, windy game turned into a snow bowl. The Rams put up a good fight, but the Eagles found the edge and knocked the Rams out of the postseason en route to their Super Bowl victory over the Kansas City Chiefs a few weeks later. Although Verse's words back in January displayed a dislike for Eagles fans, it seems his feelings have turned into respect for the screaming fans in South Philly. When he was asked about the toughest fan base to face, in his opinion, Verse fired off the Eagles once again. Read More: NFL Writer Highlights Concerning Theories For Eagles' Saquon Barkley "Probably the Eagles! Playing the Eagles is like playing your rival in college," said Verse. "You never know what they are going to say, and they're going to try to like say disrespectful stuff. They are going to bring some stuff on you. They're not going to say something where you crossed the line, but they are going to say some stuff where you're like, 'Who are you talking to?'" With the Eagles defeating the Rams twice last season, and going on to win it all, Philly fans have likely let go of their mini-rivalry with Verse, especially now since he's been showing a lot of respect for their approach to spectating the game. Verse, the Defensive Rookie of the Year, will pay another trip to Philadelphia next season. After the Eagles visited the Rams in 2024, the schedule-makers will have the Rams and the Eagles battle it out at Lincoln Financial Field for a Divisional Round rematch. For more Philadelphia Eagles and NFL news, head over to Newsweek Sports.
