by Sean Payton
I was a better player in college than I was in high school, especially if it had to do with throwing the football. People at Eastern Illinois tell me I had the third-highest passing yardage in NCAA Division 1-AA history: 10,665. I know my seventy-five touchdowns were a school record until Tony Romo sailed past me in 2002. We went 11-2 my senior year.
I loved the whole dynamic of a football offense, predicting where my open receivers would be, scrambling when I had to, counting on the protection of a sturdy offensive line. The quarterback has to account for a large number of variables, working under pressure and making decisions on the fly. Football taught me the thrill of that. But most of all, football gave me confidence and it gave me a goal. After college, I didn’t feel done yet. I wanted to make a run at the pros. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Six-foot, 200-pound quarterbacks from Eastern Illinois are not the biggest pro-scout magnet. But I wasn’t finished chasing that dream. I knew the odds were against me. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. And if, for whatever reason, it didn’t work out, I figured I could always do what J. R. Bishop had done: I could be a football coach.
I was a good quarterback. But the truth is, I wasn’t good enough to play professionally. Not for a living. At least I was smart enough to figure that out relatively soon. Relatively. The 1987 draft came. I didn’t get drafted. I had a one-day tryout with the Kansas City Chiefs. Their quarterback was hurt in a car wreck. I got fifty dollars for the day and a night in the local Adam’s Mark. That was my Chiefs career. Someone came up with the idea of playing football indoors. That spring, I tried out for the Chicago Bruisers, one of the original four clubs of the Arena Football League. I made the team and played in a grand total of four games. There was a mixed crew in the league: some ex-NFL players, some first-year guys just out of college like me. After Week Three of the season, we were flying to Pittsburgh to play the Gladiators, when I got a call from Wayne Giordano, general manager of the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League. He wanted me to play for them. This was a step in the right direction—from the small time to the not-quite-as-small time. In one short phone conversation, the Canadian GM and Jim Foster, the Arena owner, made a deal for my football rights: I’d play Friday night’s game in Pittsburgh. Then I’d fly to Ottawa. The Rough Riders would pay the Bruisers one thousand dollars to release me. In leagues like these, this is what passes for a big-money deal. For the record, I was the first player ever traded or sold in the Arena Football League.
In my month and a half in Ottawa, I didn’t get any playing time. They used me on the practice squad. The coach, Fred Glick, called me into his office one day and said matter-of-factly: “We’re moving on.” I went back home to Naperville. I painted condos with my buddies and started looking for my next football job. That fall, the NFL players went on strike, and I thought that might be an opportunity. It was, briefly. I caught on as a replacement quarterback with the Chicago Bears—“the Spare Bears,” they called us. All the fans wanted to know was, “When are the real Bears coming back?” In three games, I completed eight of twenty-three passes for seventy-nine yards, no touchdowns and one interception. I was sacked seven times for minus forty-seven yards. Numbers like those didn’t give the real Bears too much incentive to keep me around when the players’ strike ended after twenty-four days. I was clearly running low on options. But I still had one last Hail Mary career move. By the way, that one interception came at the hands of the replacement New Orleans Saints.
You know that John Grisham book Playing for Pizza? It’s about a quarterback who can’t get work in the NFL, so he signs on with a semipro team in Italy. Change a few details, and that was me. Only I went to England instead of Italy. My team was the Leicester Panthers of the UK Budweiser National League. I liked the idea of a beer-sponsored football league, and the Panthers seemed happy to have me. The deal worked like this: They recruited four Americans as player-coaches on what was really one step up from a club team. We got free beer and spending money. The rest of the players were blue-collar British guys who weren’t being paid to play American football. They figured at least we knew the game. The four of us played, coached, lived in a house together, lifted weights in the morning, hit golf balls in the afternoon and hung out in the local pubs at night, all with equal vigor. I was single. I was playing the game I loved. I was having the time of my life. I especially took to the coaching part. Working with the Brits during our evening practices. Trying to teach them things I knew about the game. Seeing actual improvement. I got real satisfaction out of that and seemed to have some talent for it.
It was right in that period that the thought finally clarified in my mind. Maybe I wasn’t going to be a top-level professional quarterback. But coaching, I decided early that summer, really could be the thing for me. I was also starting to hear stories from my friends back home. They were twenty-two or twenty-three by then. They were buying nice little houses on the outskirts of town. They were starting careers, getting married, having babies and getting on with their lives. I was feeling like I needed to move on. Staying in England forever wasn’t much of an option. So how was I going to find a coaching job?
2
COLLEGE DAYS
IT WAS TIME TO return to America.
I remembered from my days at Eastern Illinois that there was such a thing as a graduate assistant in a college football program. The assistants weren’t full-time coaches. But they would pass out rosters, edit film and perform any other tasks the coaches told them to. This was the entry level, the absolute ground floor of the college coaching world. It wasn’t even officially a job. Instead of a salary, the graduate assistants got grad school tuition and room and board. These positions were still hard to get. But if you got one and caught the eye of the real coaches on your staff, maybe they’d hire you eventually as an actual assistant—or recommend you to one of their coaching friends. It definitely sounded better than painting condos in Naperville.
Still in England, I heard about an opening for a graduate assistant at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. But to have any chance of being chosen, I’d have to go for an interview with Coach Wayne Nunnely within the week. Getting from Leicester to Las Vegas is easier said than done. And expensive, I might add. I bought a two-day round-trip ticket from a travel agent for £980, which was pretty much all the money I had, and I went to see Coach Nunnely. He was a heavyset fellow I’d never met before. We had a nice talk. As we were finishing, he said, “I gotta ask you one question, and I want your honest answer.”
OK.
“If one of the coaches on our staff ever asked you to do something and you thought maybe it wasn’t right or maybe it wasn’t ethical, what would your reaction be?”
A thought went racing through my head. Man, these Vegas guys are cheating. He’s asking me if I’d be loyal if they hired me.
“Coach,” I said, “I’ll be honest with you. If I’m working for your staff, I’m going to do what your staff asks. So regardless what they ask of me, I’m gonna do it with blinders on and not really hesitate.”
Coach Nunnely paused. There was quiet in the room. It was just the two of us. “Wrong answer,” he said. “I would want you to come to me.”
Uh-oh.
I tried to salvage my calculated answer. “Certainly I would come to you,” I said. “When you asked that question, I thought you wanted to make sure I was someone who would do whatever was asked of him. I would always want to be thought of that way. Loyal.”
“I can appreciate that,” the coach said.
The day after I landed back in England, I got the follow-up call from Las Vegas. They’d hired some other young guy. I hated to hear that. But I learned a lesson early that has stuck with me my entire coaching career: Don’t just tell people what you think they want to hear. Take the time to figure out what you really believe. I hadn’t done that the way I should have, and it probably cost me.
But that wasn’t the end of that. Three days later, I got a call from Steve Devine, the offensive line coach at San Diego St
ate. He supervised their graduate assistant program. He said he’d been speaking with Wayne Nunnely in Las Vegas. He’d also heard about me from Jim Wachenheim, who’d been one of J. R. Bishop’s assistants in Naperville and was then coaching at University of the Pacific. They’d both said I might be looking for a GA position. That’s another lesson I was learning in a hurry. Coaching is a small fraternity. People talk. Relationships matter. Take good care of them.
I told Steve Devine I didn’t have any money left to fly to California for an interview. I’d spent it all traveling to Las Vegas. But we talked on the phone a while, and then he said: “We need three GA’s. You’ve gotten good recommendations. So do you want to accept this position with San Diego State? We’ll need you here August first.”
And just like that, my football coaching career had begun. God, I had so much to learn. I flew from London to Chicago, gathered my stuff and drove three days to San Diego in a brown 1980 Chevy Cavalier that broke down in Denver. I really felt I was onto something here.
In San Diego, I got busy trying to make a good impression. Denny Stolz, the head coach, thought I worked hard, and I did. As a graduate assistant, you’re really competing with the other GA’s on the staff for the attention of the head coach. In college football he is unquestionably the boss. I worked with the offense. I spliced tape. I almost never went home, and that’s no exaggeration. I had a little army cot in the office, and I slept there for a while. It was doable. They had showers and a steam room and toiletries—everything you’d need. I stayed in San Diego for two seasons. Not a bad place to be a single, aspiring coach.
This wasn’t a big start, but it was a real one. I was on my way into coaching. From San Diego, I worked my way up the college football world. I got a full-time assistant’s job at Indiana State—$22,500, health insurance and a state-owned car with a sycamore leaf on the side. I was assigned to work with the quarterbacks and receivers, and I had my own recruiting area. I’d met the head coach, Dennis Raetz, when I was in college and he’d come to Eastern Illinois to watch the St. Louis Cardinals practice. He’d remembered me. It was at Indiana State that I started to learn what life is really like as an assistant college football coach. Let’s just say that in the early years, glamorous is not quite the word.
Indiana State is also where I met a young woman from tiny Morocco, Indiana, named Beth Shuey. She had just graduated with a marketing degree and moved to Indianapolis for a job in business sales. She was beautiful. She was smart. She at least pretended to be interested in my theories about next year’s Sycamore offense. She had no problem with my Dockers-and-red-flannel wardrobe. She was OK with the $22,500. God only knows why she was attracted to a young football coach with too much intensity and a desire to move every year or two. Maybe it was the cool sycamore leaf on the side of my car. We dated. That meant plenty of one-hour drives down I-70 between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. We got married. Could she have possibly known what she was in for? There’s an expression in our business about outkicking your coverage. Clearly, I had done that with Beth. When I was asked to return to San Diego State, this time as a real assistant coach working with the running backs, she said, “Let’s go.” After a lifetime of Midwestern winters, she said Southern California sounded just fine to her.
No one ever gets a college coaching job from a newspaper ad. As you’re building a coaching career, one job leads to another, almost always with someone who knows you from someplace else. Your schools might be bitter rivals, but the man on the other sideline—or the guy in the headset barking orders beside you—is often the one recommending you for your next coaching position. It’s a very small world out there. Everybody knows everybody. Your reputation is all you’ve got.
And if you want to advance, be ready to keep moving.
We spent two years in San Diego. Then it was on to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with Randy Walker. I was the quarterbacks coach. Then a year at the University of Illinois. Beth and I bought our first house in Champaign.
This is a crazy life, jumping from college to college like that. It’s almost like being in the Army. It’s especially hard on young families. There’s a reason so many get out of the profession to sell insurance or coach high school ball. From San Diego to Indiana back to San Diego to Ohio to Illinois—none of these jobs was easy. None of them was especially well paid. But I loved every one of them. I was learning more about the game of football. I was learning how to motivate. And I was meeting a group of fellow coaches who would become my colleagues and good friends. Many would later join me for our Super Bowl run in New Orleans.
Those were glorious times. Driving a U-Haul to Ohio, pulling Beth’s Mitsubishi Galant. The university couldn’t pay to move us, but they gave us a BP credit card. We’d fill the tank, then stock up on candy, chips, sandwiches, drinks and anything else they sold in the service-station mini-mart.
I remember six of us riding in a van from Terre Haute to New Orleans for my very first coaching convention—no idea the city would ever be anything but a party town to me. We shared a two-bed room at the Holiday Inn on Bourbon Street. First four guys in at night got bed space. The last two were on the floor.
This is what it’s like building a college coaching career. Living in all these different places. Meeting great people who will stay in your life. Storing up the crazy anecdotes.
I remember being in New Orleans one other time with my coaching buddies in those years. After a Superdome barbecue with the Saints, a stop at Pat O’Brien’s dueling-pianos bar and a riverboat casino ride, I got a six thirty a.m. call from Lou Toepper, who was head football coach at the University of Illinois. He was in the hotel lobby and just wanted to say hi.
“Did he smell the alcohol on your breath?” Beth wanted to know when I made it back to the room.
“No, I think the gum worked.”
I remember, before I left Illinois, sitting with Beth at a basketball game in Assembly Hall. I had a sixty-thousand-dollar contract by then. We were in our midcourt seats. I looked at Beth. She looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too. “Man, we got it made.” She’s from Morocco. I’m from Naperville. “We’re at the University of Illinois. We’re Big 10 now.”
In all, I spent nine years as a college football coach. It was really football college for me.
I thought my next stop was going to be the University of Maryland. And it was, briefly. I moved to College Park while Beth was pregnant with Meghan. The plan was to sell the house in Champaign, put the dog in the car and have the baby at our new home in Maryland.
But life throws you surprises. The NFL was never a career goal of mine. Being a head coach at a major university was. In 1997, that changed.
Just as we were preparing to buy a new home in Maryland, the Philadelphia Eagles offered me a job. Our stuff was already packed. The moving van took a left at I-95. Instead of unloading in College Park, Maryland, it headed for South Jersey instead.
This was major.
3
GOING PRO
BY THE TIME I got to Philadelphia, I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about coaching football. At least I thought I did. I was young. I was brash. I’d had successes and failures. I’d worked for some first-rate college coaches and learned lessons from all of them. At this point I figured all I needed was the brighter lights of a bigger stage. The fame, the riches, the accolades—wouldn’t they all be mine?
I was clueless.
I was the Eagles’ quarterbacks coach, working with offensive coordinator Jon Gruden and offensive line coach Bill Callahan. This was football on a different level, advanced training for me. When I had interviewed with Jon and Bill, Bill said they were looking for “blank tape,” an assistant who would keep his mouth shut, listen and learn. Every day, I learned something new from these two or corrected something I learned incorrectly in my previous nine years as a coach. I thought I had worked hard in college. The demands were so much greater in the NFL. Some weeks during the season, I barely went home at a
ll. It was like I was back in San Diego again, just getting started.
Gruden, whose dad had coached at Notre Dame, was one of the brightest young coaches in the league. He’d been with Mike Holmgren in San Francisco and Green Bay and was an expert at the West Coast offense that Bill Walsh had pioneered with quarterbacks Ken Anderson and Joe Montana. Gruden had what we call a very impressive coaching tree. Traditional football theory said establish your running game first, drawing the defense in and opening passing possibilities downfield. The Walsh-Holmgren-Gruden approach said no. You’re better off with short passes to the left and right, stretching the defense out. That will open holes for longer running plays. It’s faster, bolder and more dramatic than the traditional way football was always played. It also seemed to fit my personality. But after I’d been in Philly a year, Gruden was hired by Al Davis as head coach of the Oakland Raiders. He took Callahan along as offensive coordinator. The head coach in Philly, Ray Rhodes, lasted one more season until he got fired, which meant I was getting fired, which meant here I was looking for a job again.
Yes, insecurity is a fact of life in the pros too.
Philly wasn’t a long stay for me, just two years total. But it got me to the NFL. And it gave me two gifts I knew would remain with me the rest of my coaching career: a higher sense of standards and an offensive system that just felt right.
Beth and I drove down to see my mom in Tennessee. My dad had died two years earlier, during my first year in Philly. My mother was living between Nashville and Knoxville in a little place called Fairfield Glade. Jon was trying to get Al Davis to hire me as the Raiders’ quarterbacks coach. There were also possibilities with the New York Giants and the Tennessee Titans. I got a message that Jim Fassel, the head coach of the Giants, wanted me to come up to New Jersey and interview for their quarterbacks job. Jon said, “Go interview. I’m still working Al on this end. I don’t want you to miss out on something.”
