With injuries continuing to mount across New Orleans professional sports, the Saints and Pelicans have reportedly begun using a shared injury announcement template designed to reduce administrative costs and eliminate unnecessary duplication between the two franchises.
The internal system allows communications staff to enter a player’s name, select an injured body part, and immediately generate an official statement.
“There was no reason for two separate departments to keep writing essentially the same hamstring announcement,” an organization spokesperson said. “Now we just change the name at the top.”
Sources say the Pelicans originally developed the template several seasons ago, but recently made it available to the Saints after a sharp increase in preseason demand.
To further improve efficiency, “hamstring” now appears as the default injury. The system also automatically populates the organization’s standard recovery timeline: “will be sidelined for at least two weeks due to a right hamstring strain and will be reevaluated at that time.”
“We found that two weeks gives everyone enough information to feel like they received an update without actually committing us to anything,” the spokesperson said.
The timeline can be manually changed, although sources say doing so triggers a warning asking, “Are you sure?”
For longer-term injuries, staff can simply select “two weeks” multiple times.
Officials say consolidating the process should significantly reduce staffing needs by eliminating positions previously dedicated to typing “two weeks” into separate documents.
“If anything, fans should receive exactly the same information they were getting before,” the spokesperson said. “Just from fewer people.”
The organization is also testing an AI agent to handle the remaining task of inserting a player’s name into the template and hitting send, potentially removing employees from the process altogether.
“It’s state-of-the-art, with a beautifully simple interface,” the spokesperson said. “So that’s exciting for the fans.”
Sources described the technology as promising but said developers are still teaching the system that “reevaluated in two weeks” does not necessarily mean the player will return in two weeks.
The Saints and Pelicans are reportedly exploring additional efficiencies ahead of the regular seasons, including a “next man up” keyboard shortcut and automatically adding players to the injury report whenever they enter the building.