New Orleans Saints release 12-year veteran punter Morstead

The Saints are making daily roster changes as they look to enhance the bench

After having a long journey with the New Orleans Saints, across 12 seasons while playing a very important role for the team, it’s been recently announced that Saints punter Thomas Morstead has been released from the team. He’s leaving the team with awesome numbers, making him the Saints’ all-time leader in punts (692), punting yards (32,190) and yards per punt (46.52).

When it comes to the playoffs, only Drew Brees managed to have more appearances than Morstead in franchise history. Still, he appeared in a total of 205 of these games. He has recently indicated in a press conference that he has no intention at all of retiring, and he’s looking forward to continuing with his NFL career if he gets an opportunity on any other team. He added, “The journey’s not over for me.”

The 2020 season wasn’t Morstead’s best and he is aware of it. In that season, the player only managed to get an average of 43.1 yards per punt, making it the lowest ever achieved in his career. There were no excuses made by the punter; however, he did realize he was playing with several lingering issues that could have affected his performance. Morstead said, “I’ve just always been a guy that relies on elite consistency, and I think it was pretty clear that that was lacking this year.”

After releasing Morstead, the Saints will save around $2.5 million against the salary cap they have been facing this year. Morstead said goodbye to his team by saying, “I have nothing but total love and respect and everything for how the team has treated me through the years. Whatever expectation I could have possibly had going into a career was just totally blown out of the water, so I’m just very grateful.”