Vintage 1990s NFL Officially Licensed New Orleans Saints 🏈 Bumper Sticker

Remember New Orleans Saints Bumper Stickers? 🏈 Vintage 1990s Saints Bumper Sticker, Team NFL, Tag Express of Duluth, Georgia

Size: 11" x 3" ~ Never used, still on the backing.

Behold the splendor of the '90s! We're proud to present this Vintage NFL Officially Licensed New Orleans Saints Bumper Sticker, perfect for showing off your team pride.

A 1990s New Orleans Saints bumper sticker that never made it onto a bumper. It's the gold helmet with the fleur-de-lis, a big SAINTS with New Orleans written across it in script, still on its backing tab with the barcode and the little hang hole it hung by on the store rack. They've sat stacked together a long time, so you may find a little residue on the backing, and it wipes right off. Put one on the truck, the laptop or the cooler, or leave it on the backing and frame it. The colors are pure Saints: a gold-into-silver halftone background behind the gold Saints helmet with its white fleur-de-lis and black facemask, SAINTS in big gold-and-black block capitals, and New Orleans laid over the top in white script.

🏭 Tag Express of Duluth, Georgia

Look down in the bottom right corner and you'll find the maker's name in tiny type: TAG EXPRESS, DULUTH, GA. Tag Express was a licensed sports goods outfit up in Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, and in the 1990s it turned out novelty plastic license plates, key chains, key tags and stickers for NFL clubs, colleges and the other big leagues. The little 1351 in the opposite corner is the design number.

Around 2000 Tag Express was bought by Rico Industries, a company that got its start in May 1944, when three immigrant relatives began making wallets out of scrap leather, and that became a sports licensee itself in 1984. Rico kept the Tag Express name going, and you'll still find "Rico Industries/Tag Express" on licensed plate frames today. One for the barcode folks: the number on this sticker's tab starts 0 94746, and Rico's products still carry barcodes that start the very same way.

🚂 A Town Named as a Joke

Duluth, Georgia has a fun story of its own. It started out as Howell's Crossing, and when the railroad came through in 1871 it took the name Duluth. Everybody got the joke: Kentucky congressman J. Proctor Knott had just made a famous speech in Congress mocking the railroad up to Duluth, Minnesota, and according to the reports of the day it was Evan P. Howell who jokingly suggested borrowing the name. By the time this sticker was printed the town was booming, growing from about 9,000 people in 1990 to more than 22,000 by 2000.

🏈 Team NFL

The Team NFL badge on the tab was the league's own stamp for official merchandise. NFL Properties, the arm the league set up in 1963 to look after its own and its teams' names and logos and to license them to manufacturers, started putting Team NFL on official goods in the late 1980s, and it faded off the shelves around the turn of the century. That badge and the Duluth maker's line put this one squarely in the 1990s.

🎺 When the Saints Go Marching In

The New Orleans Saints were born on November 1, 1966, All Saints' Day, when John W. Mecom Jr. was awarded the franchise, and the team took its name from the jazz standard everybody in New Orleans knows. The fleur-de-lis on the helmet is the old French symbol that's all over Louisiana. They played at Tulane Stadium until they moved into the Superdome in 1975. The early years were rough: twenty straight seasons without a winning record, and in 1980, a 1-15 year, fans famously wore paper bags over their heads and called the team the 'Aints. Broadcaster Buddy Diliberto is the one who started it, wearing a grocery bag on his head to plug a brown-bag special, and the fans took it from there.

⚜️ The '90s Saints

Here's the team you were cheering for when a sticker like this went on the bumper. Jim Mora took over in 1986, and the next season the Saints closed with nine straight wins and made the playoffs for the first time. Then came the Dome Patrol: Rickey Jackson, Sam Mills, Vaughan Johnson and Pat Swilling, four linebackers who all went to the Pro Bowl for the 1992 season. The Saints won the NFC West in 1991 (they played in the West, of all places, right through 2001). Mora resigned in 1996, Mike Ditka arrived for 1997, and in 1999 Ditka traded every pick he had left in that draft, plus a first and a third the year after, to move up and take Ricky Williams. The first playoff win in franchise history finally came in the 2000 season under Jim Haslett, 31-28 over the Rams after leading 31-7. They'd been in the NFC West since 1970, and it took the league's 2002 realignment to move them into the new NFC South.

⚜️ Rebirth

And then the hardest stretch the team ever had. When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, the Superdome became a shelter of last resort for thousands of people, and the Saints spent that whole season on the road, playing "home" games in San Antonio and Baton Rouge. They came back to a rebuilt Superdome on Monday night, September 25, 2006, against the Falcons, and in the first quarter Steve Gleason blocked a punt that was recovered for a touchdown. There's a statue of that play outside the stadium now, called Rebirth. Three and a half years later, on February 7, 2010, Drew Brees and the Saints beat the Colts 31-17 in Super Bowl XLIV, with Tracy Porter's interception return sealing it.

🖼️ Display

It'll look great on your car, laptop, and more!

Put it on the bumper, the toolbox or the garage fridge, or keep it on the backing as a piece of 1990s Saints history. Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled. Who Dat!