Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  Clearly, Drew Brees was at the center of this team we were building. Others also began to distinguish themselves in a positive light.

  Deuce McAllister, who was recovering from major knee surgery he’d had the year before, had a limited role in the off-season, much like Drew. “Much of the Saints’ future,” the sports analysts said, “will depend on where Drew and Deuce are in rehab.” That wasn’t far from the truth.

  Gradually, the roster was changing dramatically. This isn’t uncommon for teams with a new coaching staff. But we were not only putting a team together, we were establishing a whole new way of life. We were a football team on permanent fast-forward.

  13

  GETTING SHOT

  WE WERE HAVING A good initial run. We were getting important work accomplished. It had been difficult and demanding, but most of the players were responding. We were changing the culture. We were exhausting everyone. One thing we were learning: When you set super-high standards, some people will actually meet them. And when you see who doesn’t, you don’t have to continue to waste time on the people who aren’t right. We were beginning to get a good grasp on what we had and what we did not.

  And this was just minicamp.

  But we didn’t want to kill these guys. Before we broke for the summer, before we headed off for our official training camp, we decided to take one day and do something different with the team. We needed a break.

  Back in the day, a coach might take his players bowling.

  A time would come in the long training season. You’d been pushing the players hard. They were pushing themselves harder. Tensions were rising. Nerves were getting raw. The coaches, the players, the staff—everyone was exhausted. It was time for a routine buster.

  So you’d organize a bowling outing. Or take the team to play golf. Or maybe just cancel practice. It’s a sound, time-honored coaching technique. It helps the players blow off a load of steam, clear their heads, maybe bond a little.

  Except—let’s be honest here. How much head clearing are eighty NFL players likely to do in a bowling alley? How much bonding will million-dollar athletes really achieve across eighteen fairways? How much steam will hard-charging, testosterone-fueled headbangers blow off on a free Tuesday?

  Who are we kidding? This isn’t your father’s NFL.

  When our guys started getting tired and tense, I knew we needed a venue that was a little more fitting for their competitive natures, aggressive tendencies and killer instincts. No offense, Brunswick, but bowling didn’t seem like the answer here.

  On this particular morning, our meeting started like it always did, with the football equivalent of roll call on a cop show. An inspirational message. An overview of that day’s practice plans. Some logistical directions before we hit the field. On this day, as on many others, the lights were lowered and a PowerPoint presentation came up.

  Only this was not the usual morning-meeting PowerPoint presentation. It was the opening battle scene from Saving Private Ryan. It’s Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. There’s a crazy firefight and—you remember—the guy pulls out a little mirror. He’s using the mirror to get the location of a German soldier. At the end of the day, the Americans are able to advance, but under heavy fire. It’s twenty-five minutes of some of the most intense moviemaking you ever saw.

  The clip ended, and I spoke to the team.

  “Our staff works hard,” I said. “They work hard to make sure we are covering everything. We can prepare you for the two-minute offense and the red zone and third down. But at some point, you’ll have to get into these battles yourselves. You’ll have to depend on each other. Your talent, your training and each other—that’s where your strength will come from.”

  Just then, big globs of paint splattered across the video screens. Red, blue, black, followed by the words “Paintball Command”—a paintball company across Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville. Then two columns of players’ names. Those were the black and the gold paintball teams.

  As the meeting was continuing, our equipment staff was in the locker room, distributing a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt to every player. Half got black ones. Half got gold. All this was done quietly during the meeting. And five buses pulled into the parking lot, each with an armed instructor who’d be riding with the players to Mandeville to brief them on what was coming next.

  As soon as the video screens went dark, Steve Gleason, Drew Brees and some of the others started painting their faces. You could tell this was going to be competitive. We weren’t even on the buses yet.

  It’s a forty-five-minute ride from our practice facility to the paintball place. Along the way, the instructors showed the players how to load the paint pellets, how to aim the rifles and how to shoot. They explained the rules of engagement and what constitutes a kill. “These are weapons,” the instructor on our bus said. “Please don’t be shooting each other from three feet away.”

  Paintball Command is not somewhere you would just stumble on. It’s off a highway, down a gravel road through the woods. You make a left and then a right. You have to want to find it. On the property, there are a few modulars with cash registers and a staging area. There’s a grove, where later we’d eat oysters and barbecue and give out awards. But when we drove up, the layout really did seem like some military-ops location. There were a bunch of old wooden spools. There was black mesh netting just hanging there. The place looked like something you’d see in upstate Washington, maybe, or some militant skinhead outpost. It was big. It was all spread out. There were lots of trees. There was a huge wooden fort that you knew at some point one team would be defending and the other team would be trying to take.

  The CO2 canisters were already in the paint guns. The paintball pellets were stacked in bags near the guns. We had everything we needed for a long drawn-out firefight. I think we went through about $6,000 worth of ammo that day.

  We played defend the hill. We played capture the flag. The gold team attacked. The black team defended. In the next scenario, the roles were turned around. When you got hit, an official would wave his flag, declaring you dead. But you could go inside, recharge and return to fight again.

  Under any circumstances, paintball is a raucous activity. But when the combatants are highly competitive professional athletes finally freed from their protocols after months of rigorous training—well, the firefights quickly took on a crazed, frantic edge. And the rules of engagement—what rules of engagement? Mammoth linemen—320, 340 pounds—coming at one another, guns blazing. Wily special teams guys, seeking every advantage. Brees in face paint. Scott Fujita barking orders. Reggie Bush totally wild-eyed. Paint was everywhere. The coaches were as bloody as anyone.

  Me? I had my little setup in the fort—very protected, a spot I was sure wasn’t vulnerable. I had a couple of bags of ammo. I was the sniper I had always imagined myself to be. I managed to hit a few people and stay pretty clean.

  At some point, I bent slightly to my left to lift some ammo—and wham! A solid hit on my shoulder.

  Somebody got me.

  I scanned the bushes quickly. There was safety Steve Gleason, who had been waiting patiently for the shot.

  “I got him,” Gleason yelled, laughing. “I got him. I was waiting forever for that!”

  This was perfect. Gleason was one of the players we had inherited from the old regime. He’d been a Saint since 2000. And although he didn’t have the size or the speed or the paper credentials of some other defensive backs, he had something more important than any of that: He had the heart. He had the drive and the passion and the dedication to get it done, whatever it was. When I had first gotten to the Saints and met him, I thought he was an employee, not a player. He was a true special teams guy. Three months later, in one of the greatest moments in New Orleans Saints history, he would block the first punt against the Atlanta Falcons in our return to the Superdome. There’s a player on the team now just like him, Chris Reis, who recovered the onside kick that was called an ambush in Super Bowl XLIV. The
se are players who deserve every success they’ve had.

  The paintball battle continued for another ninety minutes, nothing but paint pellets flying through the woods. Black on gold. Gold on black. And lots of friendly fire.

  When the war finally ended, we all went back to the grove to eat. We gave awards to the players for their performance in the off-season program. Most improved. Biggest lifter. Perfect attendance. As a memento of the day, they all got Bose iPod docks.

  It was hot. This was June in Louisiana. After a full-throttle, two-hour firefight, I think every one of them had lost ten pounds. I’m sure we burned through more calories than we would have on the practice field.

  So much for the day off.

  There was a moment when we were finished eating lunch, just enjoying the watermelon, when I looked around at these players and thought: “These guys may be highly trained athletes. They are also little kids.”

  To this day, some of the players still have a scar, a nick or some other souvenir they can point to on their body and say, “This is from that paintball game in ’06.” The pellets were made to be shot from twenty yards, not two feet. So the next day in the locker room, our players looked like some horrible dermatological experiment gone wrong. Everyone had two or three major bruises.

  What made the day so special wasn’t just how hard they had fought the paintball battles. It was how hard they had worked in March, April and May. We had gotten on them. We had not let up. We practiced at a pace most of them had never experienced before. And that gave paintball, at that late point in the process, a near-mythic impact.

  And it cut across every line.

  On a normal day, the assistant coaches might spend 90 or 95 percent of their time with their own position group. The D line coach with the defensive line and the running back coach with the running backs. There’s some interaction with the other players in the locker room, but not a lot. When you do something like this, you get to know some other players and coaches a little more intimately than you had known them before the day began.

  It was an experience. It was something the guys would always talk about. We were bonding and creating memories here. It wasn’t just the finish line we were going for. This was something we learned eventually at the Super Bowl. The journey was just as important as the getting there.

  14

  GETTING WET

  MICKEY AND I BOTH felt like it would be good to take this year’s training camp out of town. This wouldn’t be the first time the Saints had gone away for camp. Training camp had been held in several different places. The team had been to Thibodaux in southwest Louisiana. They’d gone as far as Wisconsin. And many years, camp was held right on Airline Drive. But in the summer of 2006, we believed, there were too many distractions in New Orleans. Too many things still weren’t working right. If we were expecting these players to devote themselves 100 percent to football, we knew a little distance couldn’t hurt.

  We would serve New Orleans better, I thought, by briefly getting away.

  I liked the idea of setting up training camp on a small college campus where everything we needed could be self-contained. Away from the city but not too far away. “Let’s look at a radius of a couple hours,” I told Mickey. “Maybe there’s a place we can find.”

  We visited the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We visited Southeastern and Northeastern. We’d heard about Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi. The team had another reason for sending us out on this Gulf-region campus-scouting tour. We were doing a PR deal with Mr. Benson to help generate season-ticket sales. We flew up to Shreveport and made an announcement about an upcoming preseason game. Then we flew over to Jackson. While we were there, we had a chance to look at the facilities at Millsaps. We loved what we saw.

  Millsaps College was Old South. Founded in 1889 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church, the school has a lovely campus on the edge of downtown Jackson, surrounded by a tall iron fence. I liked the fact that it was just two hours from New Orleans. But I especially liked the fact that here was an entire universe cut off from the many distractions of outside life. Where the players would sleep, where we’d all eat, where we’d hold our meetings, where we’d practice—all that was in close proximity. Millsaps was a place where you could put your dorm key on a shoelace and not worry about anything except the things you were supposed to be worrying about. I don’t know if our players that summer would describe it the same way. But the campus seemed ideal for a brutally tough New Orleans Saints training camp.

  The fields were beat up a little. One had a slope. And the dorms were old. The beds were so small, I wasn’t sure how a football player could squeeze into one. We came up with an arrangement and placed a large order with a bedding company: In every room, there were two double box springs with a queen mattress on top. It looked a little ridiculous, like a multilayered wedding cake with sheets and blankets. But it worked.

  The players understood training camp was going to be hot. This was late July in Mississippi. What did they expect? But I asked the college maintenance chief to keep the inside temperature as low as he possibly could. It might be an oven on the practice field, but I wanted a deep freeze inside.

  This would keep the players from dozing off in the meetings after a long day on the field.

  The maintenance man lowered all the thermostats—the players would say to 61 or 62 degrees in the meeting rooms, in the dorms, everywhere we were that was inside. I blamed this on the maintenance crew in the same breath I was telling the director: “Thanks. It’s perfect.” Dan Dalrymple, our strength coach who weighs about 340 pounds, claimed he had frost on his windows. Dan was exaggerating. But watching him climb on his bed was a treat. Players, coaches, everyone—we all wore sweatshirts inside.

  When a professional team arrives on campus and sets up a training camp, the relationship with the college can be a little dicey. The college administrators like the activity. They appreciate the income. But we’re using their facilities. Maybe the staff and the students are inconvenienced. From the president on down, people at the college can sometimes ask, “Is it really worth the headaches? We don’t need to be the summer landlord of an NFL team.” But the character of our players seemed to matter. The people at Millsaps, the people in greater Jackson—they kept coming up and telling me, “We love your team. They are such good guys. Coach, we love the players you’re signing. They’re respectful in the cafeteria. They’ll sign autographs. Please keep coming here.”

  One thing was obvious: The people at Millsaps were totally committed to making everything right. They were awesome.

  Certainly, we were pushing hard on the practice fields, harder even than we had on Airline Drive. This was a new level of brutal practice. Running and hitting. Running some more. Full-pad practices twice a day in the Mississippi sun. Really, what choice did we have? This team was going to have to be in excellent shape to win in this league.

  It was difficult. It was drudgery. It was stiflingly hot.

  And practice was never rained out. The big joke at training camp was that it rained often in the humid Jackson summer—but it never seemed to rain until our practice was done. It was as if we had made some deal with the devil.

  “This is like that movie The Truman Show,” I told the media one day. “We are controlling the rain to fit our schedule. Nothing gets in the way of our practice.”

  The way our players were practicing, they could have fallen asleep on a big pile of jagged bricks. Those wedding cake beds never looked so good.

  The first question each day was always, “How hot is the turf going to be at nine a.m.?” That’s where we started practice every morning. That’s where I wanted our first conditioning test to be.

  One morning, our head trainer, Scottie Patton, came over to me. He had the little heat index. He said, “Sean, the heat index is 128 right now.”

  You have to understand the role of a head trainer. Their job is to worry. Scottie had been dealing with the IVs each day. The temperatures weren�
�t getting any cooler. Players used to say they saw no birds flying over Jackson, only low-buzzing horseflies.

  Mainly what we did was practice and practice some more.

  In the years since that summer, our players have never forgotten that training camp. Complaints about our stay there are an ingrained part of New Orleans Saints folklore. It was something that everyone suffered through together. We were laying a foundation for what was coming next.

  The back-and-forth became like a ritual.

  “Hey, Coach,” someone would say, “cold enough in here for you? You think maybe we could get ’em to lower it a few more degrees before the meeting starts?”

  “I wanted it cold,” I’d bark. “It’s cold, all right?”

  And we were seeing progress.

  Gradually, but only gradually, the strength was returning to Drew Brees’s arm and Deuce McAllister’s knee. We were all impatient, of course—no one more than Drew and Deuce. We watched them both closely and tried to measure each day’s progress. In practice one day, I told Pete Carmichael, the quarterbacks coach: “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of velocity with Drew’s passing. Is this what we’re getting?”

  Pete was the only coach who could compare Drew’s velocity to how it was before the injury when they’d worked together in San Diego.

  “No, no, Coach,” Pete assured me. “It’s not looking good right now. But this isn’t it. This isn’t his arm strength at all.”

  Just say we were concerned.

  Midway through training camp, we saw Drew and Deuce begin to get better. In Drew’s case, his timing started to click. Deuce was beginning to move more quickly on his surgically repaired knee. Both of them were making visible progress. But would it be enough? And would it be in time?