When he wasn’t extracting government handouts, Benson played the standard relocation hand. He courted other cities—he seemed most interested in moving the Saints to San Antonio or Los Angeles—and threatened to uproot the franchise if he didn’t get a better lease or a new stadium. “He was in a perfect situation,” says Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts. “He essentially had no money tied up in New Orleans and was free to pick up and leave by invoking the termination clause in his contract.” After the 2006 season, the Saints could have opted out of their deal with the state by repaying the $81 million they had received in inducements. They not only could have, Matheson says, but very likely would have: “The Saints had no long-term prospects in New Orleans. They were as good as gone.”

Ironically, Katrina improved the team’s short-term prospects in New Orleans. “The devastation spurred an outpouring of local support,” says Matheson, “and made moving the Saints to another city politically untenable for the N.F.L.”

In the hurricane’s frantic aftermath, Benson LeBlanc was thrust into a pivotal role in management. During the past two years, she has driven the N.F.L. franchise with the shakiest economic base into profitability. Before Benson LeBlanc, the Saints were known mostly for their struggles on and off the field. “It was coach versus player, or player versus player, or management versus the public,” says chef Emeril Lagasse, owner of three New Orleans restaurants and a Saints season-ticket holder for two decades. “All that has changed with Rita. She’s like a magnet that connects with people. She’s a rarity in pro ball.”

For St. Rita’s next miracle, she has to find a way to keep the Saints in town.

The N.F.L. has long been an old boys’ club packed with old men. Only a handful of the 32 teams are run by women, and Benson LeBlanc is the youngest. Still, her gridiron C.V. is more impressive than that of almost any of the ancient members, including her grandfather. She spent her high school and college summers interning in various league offices. In 2001, after graduating from Texas A&M with a degree in agribusiness, she started working for the Saints, for whom she did everything from distributing press credentials to logging stats into computers for coaches.

Benson LeBlanc says her dream job is to be an antiquarian-book hunter. And she reads constantly. Recently she found personal resonance in Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence’s Pompeii: The Living City, which re-creates the bustling life in the Roman town before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. “It’s very difficult to react quickly to complex crises,” she says. “I found it helpful in the context of our business planning to be proactive so that our people could prepare for unforeseen obstacles.” Prepped in large part by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, the Saints were ready for Katrina. “We always had a plan,” says Benson LeBlanc, who was actively involved in all phases of the team’s evacuation. Her energy seems inexhaustible. “She has been kind of round-the-clock since she was a kid,” her grandfather says.

The oldest child of Renee Benson and Russell LeBlanc, Rita was born in Houma, a Cajun outpost in southeast Louisiana perhaps best known as the setting for the Swamp Thing comic books. When she was still an infant, her family moved from the bayou to San Antonio and then to a ranch in nearby Johnson City, the birthplace of Lyndon Johnson. She was eight years old in 1985 when her grandfather—a banker, car dealer, and New Orleans native—purchased the Saints from original owner John Mecom for $70 million. During Mecom’s stewardship, the Saints went marching in place for 18 seasons. They never had a winning record and finished last in their division seven times. The low-water mark came in 1980, when the “Aints” won only one of their 16 games and thousands of embarrassed and enraged fans showed up for home games wearing paper bags over their heads.