Saints troll Eagles, wear ski masks after NFL playoff win
Two Saints players poured it on following their playoff win over the Eagles.
Two New Orleans Saints players decided to follow the team’s 20-14 win over the Eagles in the playoffs Sunday night by taking a bit of a victory lap and donning ski masks during their post-game interviews.
Some Eagles defensive backs began wearing ski masks near the end of the season, an idea championed by injured cornerback Jalen Mills as symbolizing the team’s need to steal everything it could to make it into the postseason.
“Where we are right now, if we want to continue to go play, we’ve got to go take it,” safety Malcolm Jenkins said last month.
But Sunday night, it was Saints running backs Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara who donned ski masks during their post-game interviews and suggested the Eagles stole the idea from them.
"We've been on the ski mask tip," Ingram told ESPN’s Dianna Russini. "Mike [Thomas] ran out with the ski-mask when we played the Eagles. He ran out the tunnel with the ski-mask on, and them boys got the ski-mask on next week."
“It’s a copycat league,” Kamara added.
According to the New Orleans Advocate, Ingram was a bit off on his dates. Thomas actually wore a ski mask during player introductions against the Washington Redskins on Oct. 8 — a month before the Saints defeated the Eagles 48-7 in the Superdome.
Kamara was echoing comments he made after the Saints defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 16, when he called Eagles players “frauds” for donning ski masks.
“There’s a lot of fraudulent out there, so we gotta let them boys know who the real ski mask shawties is,” Kamara told reporters.
That wasn’t the only trolling the Saints did following their playoff win. After the game, the team danced and celebrated in their locker room to Meek Mill’s "Dreams and Nightmares,” which became the Eagles unofficial anthem during last season’s Super Bowl run.
The Saints kept the trash-talk going well into the night on Twitter.
This isn’t the first time Kamara has spoken out against the Eagles. Following the Birds' 38-7 win over the Minnesota Vikings in last year’s NFC championship game, Kamara told Bleacher Report that the Saints would have easily defeated the Eagles if they’d hadn’t already lost to the Vikings a week earlier.
“If we won [versus Minnesota], I knew nobody was gonna stop us cause we came all the way back,” Kamara said.
The Saints weren’t alone in trolling the Eagles. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans went with the headline “Birds Boxed” on their front page, a play on the new Netflix movie Bird Box starting Sandra Bullock, who plays woman who blindfolds herself to survive an apocalypse caused by creatures that force people who see them to kill themselves.