This wouldn’t be the first time the Saints had gone away for camp. Training camp had been held in several different places. The team had been to Thibodaux in southwest Louisiana. They’d gone as far as Wisconsin. And many years, camp was held right on Airline Drive. But in the summer of 2006, we believed, there were too many distractions in New Orleans. Too many things still weren’t working right. If we were expecting these players to devote themselves 100 percent to football, we knew a little distance couldn’t hurt. We would serve New Orleans better, I thought, by briefly getting away. I liked the idea of setting up training camp on a small college campus where everything we needed could be self-contained. Away from the city but not too far away. “Let’s look at a radius of a couple hours,” I told Mickey. “Maybe there’s a place we can find.” We visited the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We visited Southeastern and Northeastern. We’d heard about Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi.
