by Myers, Gary
It was Payton’s belief in himself and his arrogance, a trait that later would betray him, that led him to accept the ultimate coaching challenge. He packed up his young family from a beautiful suburb in Dallas where they were very happy and moved to New Orleans, where reminders of Katrina and the havoc it had caused were all around. In his first season, Payton had the Saints in the NFC championship game, where they lost to the Bears in Chicago. Considering how far the Saints had come in one year, it was a tremendous achievement. By his fourth season, he won the Super Bowl, just as his mentor Parcells did in his fourth season with the Giants.
Payton needed his second trip to New York to be more productive than his first when the league had summoned him and Saints general manager Mickey Loomis to headquarters without telling them why. They knew the league had reopened the bounty investigation, but the invitation was not specific. They were caught off guard when they were peppered with questions from the NFL’s security department when they met individually in a conference room down the hall from Goodell’s office. The security staff shared some of the evidence it had gathered with Payton and Loomis. Goodell was not in the meeting, but after the security staff finished each interview, Goodell was brought in to speak with Payton and Loomis one on one. There had been talk around the NFL that after he won the Super Bowl, Payton was so full of himself it was bordering on unbearable and now he didn’t appear credible when he denied knowledge of what was going on in the defensive meeting room.
Payton had his hand in everything related to his team, and the league found it hard to believe that something that was so blatantly in violation of NFL rules was going on in his building and he had no idea. Paul Hicks, the league’s executive vice president of communications and public affairs, kept a copy of Payton’s book Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life, which Payton wrote after the Saints won the Super Bowl. Hicks and one of his staff members went through it and took notes on passages where Payton discusses his attention to detail. Hicks then reported back to Goodell, who had not read the book. The commissioner asked several sources he trusted how likely it was that Payton was in the dark while Williams and the defensive players were setting bounties on some of the biggest names in the league. The conclusion was that Payton had to have known what Williams was doing even if he was trying to distance himself from Williams, because nothing happened with his football team without his knowledge.
Payton had requested this second meeting with Goodell. They had spoken on the phone several times. Payton asked if they could get together while Goodell was in Florida attending committee meetings in advance of the league meetings later that month in Palm Beach. But Goodell was going to be tied up with the committees, so Payton arranged to come back to New York the next week. Saints owner Tom Benson was also in the league offices that day but met separately with Goodell. Payton was casually dressed for the occasion in a sport shirt and a pair of slacks. After returning from the men’s room, he settled back into Goodell’s office for another thirty minutes of trying to explain himself. The commissioner was beyond angry. He is a man of principle, an admirable trait passed down from his father. His mission was to make the game safer for the players, and here was Williams running a system that encouraged players to hurt other players; players accused of committing unforgivable player-on-player crimes when they were supposed to be a fraternity that played hard but clean; and the head coach, a Super Bowl winner, not stopping it. Other than players or coaches betting on games, which would destroy the integrity of the league, it doesn’t get much worse than players trying to hurt one another in a game that is already ultraviolent. It was now clear to the league that the Saints’ strategy was to pin the blame on Williams, who had left after the 2011 season.
Payton couldn’t have felt good as he looked around Goodell’s corner office, which overlooked Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. It’s a big office, just about as big as the one he had at 280 Park, and plenty large enough to have a desk on one side and a conference table all the way across the room. There is a big screen television to the right of a desk surrounded by photos and books. There’s a collection of footballs. On one wall is a copy of the Congressional Record. Goodell’s father, Charles Goodell, was a congressman from upstate New York when he was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to fill a U.S. Senate seat after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He took office two months after Kennedy’s death. Goodell was a Republican. Kennedy was a Democrat. As Kennedy’s replacement, Goodell angered President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew with his opposition to the Vietnam War. The Congressional Record means a lot to Roger Goodell. It contained the original copy of Bill S. 3000, sponsored by Charles Goodell, which proposed an end to the funding for the war.
The administration targeted him as a turncoat, a Republican turned liberal. Agnew called him the Christine Jorgensen—famous for a sex change operation from male to female—of the Republican Party. “We’re five boys; we’re a pretty tight-knit group,” Roger Goodell said. “Somebody attacks your father, you’re upset. The five of us were ready to go. My father would always laugh it off. It never got under his skin. He would understand that he was being attacked politically, but he never took it personally. The Goodell boys did.”
Charles Goodell’s stance on the war wound up costing him the Senate seat. He had the nomination of the Republican and Liberal parties in 1970 but split the liberal vote with Democrat Richard Ottinger, allowing the conservative James Buckley to win. “It was difficult on one level, but it was educational and important from a principle standpoint,” Roger Goodell said. “He stood up for what he believed in regardless of the consequences. He knew what the consequences were going to be.”
Charles Goodell died in 1987. He was just sixty years old. By then, his son was working in the NFL office after a massive job-seeking letter-writing campaign—he bombarded league executives with more than forty letters—that wound up getting him an entry-level job, stopping the letters and rewarding his perseverance. Roger Goodell had long ago told his father of his career goal. He wanted to be the commissioner of the NFL.
As Payton sat at the big conference table, he could catch a glance over his shoulder at the reason Goodell was so infuriated. It was the reason he should not count on leniency. Mounted on the wall was a metal replica of the NFL shield. Goodell is consumed with his responsibility to protect the shield. The Saints and Payton had done huge damage to the shield. Any degree of contrition Payton would show would be measured against his motive: Was he saying things Goodell wanted to hear so that Goodell would go easier on him when he decided on the discipline?
The culture of the team had gone way off course. The Saints thought they were above NFL rules and were trying to set their own. They were sticking it in the league’s face after being told in 2010 that NFL investigators were on to them. Everything that happens with a football team is the responsibility of the head coach. That goes for everything from calling for the game-changing onside kick to start the second half of the Super Bowl against the Colts that had Parcells raving about Payton’s “balls” to being aware that your defensive coordinator has set up a system to reward players $1,000 for “cart-offs,” when the opposing player is carried off the field, and $1,500 for “knockouts,” which sidelined them for the rest of the game. The league’s investigation revealed the pool might have reached $50,000 or more at its height during the 2009 playoffs and that linebacker Jonathan Vilma in 2009 offered $10,000 to anybody who knocked Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner out of the NFC divisional round or Vikings quarterback Brett Favre out of the NFC championship game. Warner was crushed after throwing an interception as he ran to make the tackle early in the second quarter but remained in the game through three quarters, when the Cardinals trailed by 35 points. Favre took every snap but absorbed several vicious hits. The Saints won the game in overtime. Vilma denied the allegations and sued Goodell for defamation of character.
There were impressive names on the Saints’ bounty list: Favre
, Aaron Rodgers, Warner, and Cam Newton. In the league’s initial statement, it said, “Although head coach Sean Payton was not a direct participant in the funding or administration of the program, he was aware of the allegations, did not make any detailed inquiry or otherwise seek to learn the facts, and failed to stop the bounty program. He never instructed his assistant coaches or players that a bounty program was improper and could not continue.”
Just two days after Payton left Goodell’s office, the commissioner handed out the penalties. It was damning. He suspended Payton for the 2012 season, but in effect it was an indefinite suspension. Payton had to apply for reinstatement after the 2012 season. If he didn’t follow the guidelines during his time away from the Saints, he would be subject to further penalties. “Anything that happens in the framework of your team and your program, you’re responsible for, and that’s a lesson I’ve learned,” Payton said.
Goodell did hand an indefinite suspension to Williams, who had left the Saints after the 2011 season to rejoin his friend Jeff Fisher, who had been hired to coach the St. Louis Rams. Assistant head coach Joe Vitt, who was supposed to be Payton’s eyes and ears on the defensive side of the ball, was suspended for the first six games of the season. General manager Mickey Loomis was suspended for the first eight games. The Saints organization was fined $500,000 and docked two draft picks. The investigation produced fifty thousand pages of documents.
“When interviewed in 2012, Sean Payton claimed to be entirely unaware of the program, a claim contradicted by others,” the NFL said after the penalties were announced. “Further, prior to the Saints’ opening game in 2011, Coach Payton received an email from a close associate that stated in part, ‘PS Greg [sic] Williams put me down for $500 on Rogers [sic].’ When shown the email during the course of the investigation, Coach Payton stated that it referred to a ‘bounty’ on Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers.”
In the early part of 2010, the league said Loomis advised Payton that the NFL office was investigating allegations concerning a bounty program. The league said Payton met with Williams and Vitt before they were interviewed and advised them, “Let’s make sure our ducks are in a row.” In a tersely worded section of a press release, the NFL then said, “Remarkably, Coach Payton claimed that he never inquired of Coach Williams and Coach Vitt as to what happened in the interviews, never asked them if a ‘pay-for-performance’ or bounty program was in fact in place, and never gave any instructions to discontinue such a program.”
Goodell had been on a two-year campaign to make the game safer. He upset players, particularly Pittsburgh linebacker James Harrison, by fining them big chunks of their salaries for hits that crossed the line. The Saints had picked the wrong time and the wrong issue and definitely the wrong commissioner to challenge. Goodell was not moved by the “Free Sean Payton” T-shirts that had surfaced in the French Quarter. Goodell was taking a strong stand even if it was unpopular in the city that was hosting the next Super Bowl.
“We have thirty-two clubs. We have rules in the league. When rules are violated for three consecutive years and they deny it, there are going to be consequences,” Goodell said. “That’s the way it works. We have fans in thirty-one other markets that want to make sure the game is played the right way. I know the fans in New Orleans are frustrated by what happened, and I understand that. They also want the game to be played the right way. We’re going to ensure that. My job is the credibility of the NFL.”
Goodell didn’t back down when Payton, Vitt, and Loomis filed appeals and came to New York two weeks later after the suspensions were announced to have their cases heard individually as they pleaded for lighter sentences. Nothing changed. Williams didn’t even bother filing an appeal. On the day his appeal was heard, Payton exited through a side door of 345 Park Avenue and jumped into a waiting car, avoiding the media contingent that was waiting for him.
Sean Payton’s fall from grace was dramatic. He went from being the life of the party to slipping out side doors. He must have thought that the Lombardi Trophy he slept with was his kryptonite to Goodell’s Superman and that it would be the shield that protected him.
Not even his plan to have Parcells pinch hit for him for the 2012 season worked. After saying he had an obligation to help out his friend, Parcells elected to stay retired. Vitt was elevated to interim head coach for the 2012 season except, of course, for the six games for which he was suspended. Offensive line coach Aaron Kromer was named to step in for Vitt. Goodell suspended Vilma for the entire 2012 season, defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove for the first eight games (he signed with the Packers after the 2011 season but was cut by Green Bay in training camp), defensive end Will Smith for the first four games, and linebacker Scott Fujita for the first three games (he signed with the Browns after the 2009 season). Two days before the start of the 2012 regular season, a three-member appeals panel lifted the players’ suspensions based on jurisdictional issues, leaving open the possibility for Goodell to again impose penalties. The ruling did not impact the suspensions of Payton, Vitt, or Loomis.
“Sean does have an arrogance about him,” said one coach who worked with him in the NFL. “After success, you feel like you are untouchable. He’s got that in him. There is one side of me that says that isn’t Sean. The other side says that is Sean. At some point, he thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. He always seems to start humble and turn arrogant. He was part of a cover-up. For somebody to totally disregard what the league or his owner told him to do, that is arrogant.
“Sean is a good person. But good people can make mistakes.”
Before Sean Payton’s fall, there was his rise.
Payton had had his doubts about taking the Saints job and moving his wife and two young children into an area others were moving out of as fast as they could. The football part was the kind of challenge that inspires coaches looking to make a name for themselves. The Saints were not a bad team, but they were in a bad situation. The Saints left the Gulf Coast early for a preseason game in Oakland to make sure they were out of town before Katrina arrived in New Orleans on August 29, 2005. They didn’t return as a team until 2006. Nearly two thousand people died from the hurricane and the flooding it caused. The damage was over $100 billion.
The Saints set up headquarters for the 2005 season in San Antonio, where owner Tom Benson has strong business ties. There was talk that Benson wanted to permanently move the Saints to San Antonio after Katrina, but that eventually died down. The NFL did not want Benson abandoning New Orleans. That would have been another nightmare for a region that needed all the support it could gather. The 2005 season was so disjointed for the Saints that they had no chance to succeed. They worked out of a hotel in San Antonio. Their home opener against the New York Giants was relocated to Giants Stadium with the Saints as the home team. Of course, they lost that game. Their other “home” games were played in Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge and the Alamodome in San Antonio. After winning just three games and losing thirteen, they fired coach Jim Haslett. They were moving back to New Orleans shortly after the season, and they needed a bright, fresh new face of the franchise.
Payton had personally seen how a community rallied together under the most heartbreaking and gut-wrenching circumstances. He was with the Giants after 9/11. The Giants played the season-opening Monday night game in Denver on September 10, 2001. Their United team charter flight left right after the game and touched down at Newark early the next morning. After taxiing, the plane arrived at the gate at 6 a.m. United Flight 93, a scheduled 8 a.m. flight to San Francisco, was parked two gates away. Of course, the Giants’ coaches, players, and staff thought nothing of it. It was a normal Tuesday morning at Newark. The Giants had lost the game to the Broncos and after the long four-hour flight in the middle of the night the players just wanted to get home, get into their beds, and get some sleep. The preparation for Sunday’s home opener against the Packers would begin Wednesday. A bus pulled up on the tarmac to transport the players back to
their cars, which they parked at Giants Stadium for road trips. Many of the front office executives parked their cars at the airport and exited through the terminal. Surely, they passed some of the passengers who had arrived early for Flight 93. Forty-six minutes into that flight, the hijackers overpowered the crew. The passengers then overpowered the hijackers, and the plane, which the hijackers were trying to divert to Washington, where the target was thought to be the Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Many of the Giants coaches went to their offices straight from the airport, and soon word spread throughout the building about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Jim Fassel quickly went up to the roof of the stadium with a member of the team’s film crew, who had a high-powered lens, and they were able to see the smoke coming from the area. It was only twelve miles away. The Giants would have a daily reminder of the hole in the New York skyline because downtown Manhattan was in clear view from their grass practice field in the stadium parking lot.
