It’s been an exciting season for New Orleans Saints fans, and one former Saints player from the Teche Area has been among those swept up in the excitement of the team’s run to the Super Bowl for the first time in franchise history.

Former St. Martinville Senior High standout running back and linebacker Garland Jean-Batiste, who was a replacement player when the NFL players sat out three games during the 1987 season, which was the first Saints team to make the playoffs, planned to be in Miami this weekend as New Orleans prepares to play the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV.

“I really believe they’re going to be Super Bowl champions,” said Jean-Batiste, a former FBI agent who works as head of security for a Louisiana-based environmental safety company. “Peyton Manning (of the Colts) is a great quarterback. He’s a Hall of Fame quarterback. But I think the Saints are going to win. I’m excited.”

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Jean-Batiste, who still lives Cade, also owns a food distribution company and is a candidate for director of security for the NFL. He said that he grew up a fan of the San Francisco 49ers, who won the first of their five Super Bowl championships for the 1981 season. He became a fan of the Saints after joining the team in 1987 after finishing his career at LSU.

“We got beat by the Minnesota Vikings,” said Jean-Batiste of the 1987 playoff team. New Orleans beat the Vikings in overtime in this year’s NFC championship game to reach its first Super Bowl.

He recalls how good that 1987 team was, led by the fabled “Dome Patrol” of linebackers Rickey Jackson, Sam Mills, Pat Swilling and Vaughn Johnson.

“Those guys were tough,” said Jean-Batiste. “They were old-school football players. There were no hot-shots, no prima donnas.”

This year’s team is built more around its high-octane offense rather than defense, the way the mid-80s Saints were. Though he played with running backs Rueben Mays and Dalton Hilliard and receiver Eric Martin, quarterback Bobby Hebert didn’t have the kinds of weapons at the disposal of current Saints quarterback Drew Brees, said Jean-Batiste.

Among those are running backs Pierre Thomas, Reggie Bush and Mike Bell and a deep list of receivers including Marques Colston, Devery Henderson, Robert Meachem, Lance Moore and tight ends Jeremy Shockey and David Thomas.

But the team’s success starts at the top, said Jean-Batiste, with general manager Mickey Loomis and the man he hired as the team’s head coach the year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Sean Payton.

“Sean Payton just exudes confidence as a coach,” said Jean-Batiste. “They’ve overcome a lot of adversity with all the players on defense being injured.”

Jean-Batiste, who went into a career in law enforcement first as a St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s deputy, then as a state trooper before becoming an FBI agent, said he keeps up with some of his old Saints teammates like Hilliard, Martin and Jackson, the latter of whom has a golf tournament.

Jean-Batiste also occasionally plays golf with former Saints quarterback Tyrone Hughes, who still lives in New Orleans, and is friends with former running back George Rogers, who played with the Saints from 1981-84.

And he regularly sees many of his teammates from St. Martinville, where he was named the Class 3A Defensive MVP in 1982. He and a group of 20 or so friends, many of whom played for the Tigers, get together at the home of former SMSH quarterback Kervin Fontenette each Sunday during the fall to watch NFL games. They’ve done so for the past 10 years or so, said Jean-Batiste.

“It’s a really good time,” he said. “Everybody’s got their own teams. There’s a lot of Cowboys fans, some Steelers fans.”

And some are Saints fans, who, like Jean-Batiste, are thrilled to see their team in the Super Bowl.

“It’s an exciting time,” said Jean-Batiste.