Southern soccer fan favorite player: Archie Manning, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints

Archie Manning, born May 19, 1949, went from growing up in relative obscurity in the small town of Drew, Mississippi (population 2,434) in the northwestern part of the state of Mississippi to achieving fame and fortune as the New York quarterback. Orleans. Saints of the National Football League (NFL). While he was a quarterback for the Saints football team, Manning was never able to lead the Louisiana team into the promised land of a Super Bowl championship, but he did give fans something to cheer on and a local Southern boy at the helm. to support. Over the course of his ten-year career with the Saints, Archie Manning became the favorite player of southern soccer fans.

Archie Manning grew up less than 100 miles from the Louisiana border at a time when upstart professional soccer teams in the southern states were the Dallas Cowboys (founded 1960), Houston Oilers (founded 1960), Atlanta Falcons ( founded 1966), Miami Dolphins (founded 1966) and New Orleans Saints (founded 1967). From the time that Manning was becoming a young soccer player, the NFL has expanded to the cities of Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Nashville and Charlotte in terms of southern cities represented in the 32-team league now. In many respects, the timeline for Archie Manning’s rise closely mirrors the rise of the early NFL in terms of mainstream notoriety. Unlike the sport of baseball, which traces its history back to at least the early 1900s with meticulous statistics and records, American football is a comparatively more recent phenomenon in the United States. The first Super Bowl occurred only in 1966.

After playing college football at the University of Mississippi (commonly known as Ole Miss), Archie was a prized NFL prospect due to his success as a college athlete. Although many teams wanted Ole Miss’s right-handed signal announcer, the New Orleans Saints were fortunate to select him with the No. 2 overall pick in the first round of the 1971 NFL Draft held on January 28, 1971. New Orleans fans rejoiced at the selection that offered the possibility of bringing in a son from the South to lead the upstart New Orleans Saints.

Manning would play ten years with the New Orleans Saints, where despite exceptional individual performances, he was never able to sustainably turn the franchise into a winning program. During his tenure in New Orleans, he was always a crowd favorite despite the dismal win-loss records the team used to post at the end of most years. For his efforts he was selected twice as a Pro Bowl quarterback (1978 and 1979) and in 1978 he was named the NFC Offensive Player of the Year.

Although Archie Manning spent the last two years of his career bouncing from the Houston Oilers to the Minnesota Vikings, all fans who saw the skilled 6’3 “right quarterback play during that era remember him best in a New Orleans Saints uniform. Decades Archie has served as a face of the New Orleans team in one capacity or another, as he is arguably the best player to play for the Saints.