Stephen Lew-USA TODAY Sports
By Ross Jackson
Each year after the NFL’s regular season schedule is released, a number of details are often placed under a microscope to create fodder for certain conversations such as strength of schedule. Typically, those elements include offseason moves, previous win-loss record and Vegas win total projections.
With the specificity of the schedule, additional factors like road trips, bye weeks and extended homestands come into focus. For the New Orleans Saints, who are often ideally located when it comes to away game travel, the 2026 season introduces a unique challenge: travel miles.
The usual rule of thumb is that any time a team is required to travel more than 2,000 miles one way, the traveling team is at a rest disadvantage. New Orleans hardly has any such travel during the 2026 regular season thanks to none of their away games taking place west of their matchup with the Chicago Bears.
That’s a favorable travel situation, but of course there’s one wrinkle: Paris.
Because of the team’s exciting opportunity to host the NFL’s first-ever contest in France, Week 7 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Saints’ travel schedule is just barely outside of the top-10 in distance.
Bookies.com calculated the travel mileage for each NFL club and the Saints’ rank No. 12 with 21,892 miles to traverse. However, the reality will be slightly different because of the chosen distances of measurement.
The site calculated travel from stadium-to-stadium. That means the estimated distance for the Saints’ game in Paris would be between the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans and Stade de France in Paris, roughly 9,630 miles traveled.
But the Saints are likely to cut a couple thousand miles off of their trip by flying out from a New York City-area airport following their Week 6 game at the New York Giants. That takes about 2,160 miles off the estimated total
A new total of 19,732 travel miles would shift the Saints to No. 15, just two miles fewer than the Buffalo Bills.
Without a trip to Paris, the home game against the Steelers would be located in New Orleans, resulting in no miles traveled. Without the international game, the Saints would have had one of the least demanding travel schedules in the NFL. With the game, they fit close to the middle of the league instead thanks to their expected decision to leave from the East Coast.
The trade-off being that the team gets the chance to help usher in a league-first in the NFL’s international initiative.
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