June 9, 2026, 11:08 a.m. CT
Can the New Orleans Saints end their five-year playoff drought in 2026? They’re tied with the Indianapolis Colts for the third-longest streak of years without a playoff berth. Saints fans haven’t had to wait this long between postseason games since the five-year span from 2001 to 2005. It’s their longest break since the seven-year drought of 1993 to 1999. At least if you aren’t counting the twenty years it took the Saints to reach the playoffs in the first place.
But back to the present. Just two teams have made their fans wait longer to play meaningful football: the Atlanta Falcons (8 years without a playoff berth) and the New York Jets (15 seasons, the longest drought in team history). So which of them will get back to the playoffs first?
According to ESPN’s Football Power Index, the Saints have a 23.8% shot of reaching the postseason this year. That’s much better than the Jets (3.9%) but trails both the Falcons (33.7%) and Colts (35.8%) by a healthy margin. Either way, all four teams are seen as safer bets to spend another year in the wilderness than to get back to the playoffs.
Is that fair? Each of these teams has reached a point where we need to see it to believe it with them. They’ve all undergone coaching changes and made a couple of spins of the quarterbacks carousel. There’s no benefit of the doubt here. But it’s hard not to feel optimistic about the direction the Saints are going. They have a quarterback they can believe in, a coach who seems to get it, and a roster that’s putting young pros in position to succeed. They just need to follow through. As we’ve seen the last five years, that’s easier said than done.
