The Mandela Effect and the New Orleans Saints

Let’s call it the Cliff Branch Effect

The shortest definition I can think of for the Mandela Effect is “mass delusion” and the second shortest is “false collective memory.” It’s a phenomenon where a lot of people are absolutely certain they remember something that, it turns out, didn’t happen. The Mandela Effect gets its name from the fact that a substantial number of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in a South African prison in the 1980s, despite that fact that he served as the country’s president from 1994-99 and didn’t die until 2013.

You might wonder what this has to do with the New Orleans Saints and, for that matter, Cliff Branch, who never even played for the Saints.

I made the conscious decision to become a Saints fan in seventh grade (1972-73), possibly because I liked the fleur-de-lis on their helmets. The ’70s were a great time to be a Saints fan if you were an incurable optimist but not if you actually thought your team had a chance in hell of making the playoffs. It was fun watching Archie Manning at quarterback and it was exciting to think Chuck Muncie was going to make a difference at running back and it was encouraging to have Hank Stram sign on as head coach, but from the time I decided to follow the Saints until the year they made their first playoff appearance (1987), the team had a record of 76-145-1.

They hardly ever appeared on Monday Night Football for the same reasons they don’t show live executions on TV. But there was one MNF appearance I distinctly remember. It was when my brother Ric was going to school at University of Evansville, and the Saints were playing the Raiders. We were up by two touchdowns at the end of the third quarter, and it looked like there was a chance we were going to finally win a Monday night game. To get off the schneid, as it were.

But then they made both teams play the fourth quarter.  And as I remember it, the New Orleans defense fell apart. As I remember it, Ken Stabler threw three touchdown passes to Cliff Branch and the Raiders won the game. As I remember it, the phone in the living room rang immediately and when I answered my brother said “Can you believe that?!”

As I remember it, we talked about what a colossal collapse we had just witnessed.

So, just a couple of years ago, Ric and I were talking about that night and wondering when exactly that game had occurred. I went to the NFL website and looked for game results from 1983-86, since those were the years Ric was studying at Evansville.

The results surprised me. The Saints didn’t play the Raiders during Ric’s freshman, sophomore, or senior year. They played in 1985 but on Sunday afternoon—and the Saints never led.

I wondered if it would have been a preseason game, even though Ric probably wouldn’t have even been at school yet, and even though they generally don’t show preseason games on Monday Night Football, and even though I wouldn’t have gotten all that worked up about a preseason game.

Turns out the Saints and Raiders didn’t play each other in the preseason from 1983-86 anyway.

Well, dammit, I thought, maybe this game happened when Ric was going to grad school in Miami a couple of years later.

More searching online. No results. And Cliff Branch was out of the NFL by that time.

But I knew I had seen the Saints blow a 14-point lead on Monday Night Football and I knew my brother and I had talked on the phone immediately afterward. He had to be somewhere, or I had to have missed something. Maybe a box score was wrong.

I searched up “New Orleans Saints record on Monday Night Football.” The Saints made their fourth MNF appearance (after a five-year absence) on December 3, 1979. They were playing the Raiders. They were up 35-21 at the end of the third quarter. The Raiders scored three TDs in the fourth, but only two of them were passes to Cliff Branch.

That was the game.

I was in my sophomore year at Wabash but living at home. My brother was a freshman in high school at the time, certainly not on an overnight trip anywhere.

Who the hell did I talk to on the phone that night?

I don’t know. Maybe it was Nelson Mandela.

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