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

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  After we were finished practicing, I had everyone gather on the fifty-yard line. The players were sweaty in their pads and uniforms. I introduced Doug Thornton. A former Shreveport oilman and an ex-college quarterback from McNeese State, Doug had stayed in the Dome around the clock through the entire Katrina ordeal. Then he was the person in charge of renovating the Dome. “He did a phenomenal job getting this done on time,” I told the players. “It was an amazing task. We owe him. He’s been a tremendous ally to all of us.”

  I introduced Benny Vanderklis, who was in charge of security and had also ridden out the storm. I wanted the team to recognize and appreciate what all these people had been doing and what they had managed to achieve. Then I tapped my hat. That was the signal.

  The lights went down. The Dome stayed dark for a moment. Then both the new Jumbotrons lit up, and a powerful highlights video filled the screens. Not the kind of highlights that usually play before a football game. These were highlights of Katrina. Lowlights may be a better word.

  The video was just five minutes long. But I swear, it was the most emotional five minutes of tape I’d ever seen. The rising water, the people’s faces, the houses with X’s on the doors letting the rescuers know how many bodies were inside. Those thick New Orleans accents. Very, very powerful stuff from beginning to end. And when the video was finished, these images of Katrina gave way to a song—the throaty exuberance of Hank Williams Jr. singing “Are You Ready for Some Football?”—the Monday Night Football theme.

  Talk about a jarring juxtaposition. From “Oh, my God, look at where we’ve come from” to “Oh, my God, look where we’re going now.” This was exactly the order it would go in on Monday night.

  The players looked stunned. They were just standing there in their pads in silence. I let the emotion seep in. Coaches, players, me—not a word from any of us. It was a huge, emotional moment for all of us. We were back in the Dome after all that had happened and getting ready to play. At least we went through it on Friday.

  That was exactly what I was hoping for. Three nights later, when we’d all be back in the Dome again, I wanted all of us to be past that part. I wanted the rush of emotion on Friday, not on Monday night. On Monday, this team had to execute.

  Because, remember, it’s only special if we win.

  Monday finally came, and the Superdome literally glowed. The fans were beside themselves with anticipation. Thankfully, we had a quarterback to put on the field.

  We tried to think through every last detail. We even had valet parking for the players. They’d pull up to the Dome, and fifty valets were waiting for them. They’d leave the car with a valet, and their keys would be waiting in their locker at the end of the game. No one had to worry about the parking garage.

  Traffic was backed up around the Dome. One by one, the players arrived. A huge crowd of fans watched them walk inside—not down a protected tunnel but along an open chute about twenty yards long and ten feet wide. A few of the players walked straight down the middle between the lines of fans. But most veered either left or right, waving, smiling, high-fiving the fans. Energy was being transferred. The excitement was one thing no one could ignore.

  The players were all supposed to be there by six thirty, two hours before the game. Most showed up by five thirty or six. But at six twenty, nobody had seen Drew Brees. This was strange. Drew would normally be a five o’clock guy. He’d get taped, get dressed, do his entire routine. He wasn’t someone who liked to rush in.

  I was getting concerned. “Where is Drew?” I yelled at Greg Bensel, the PR guy. Greg made a cell phone call. He sent a text. Finally, he had an answer. “He got spun around in his Land Rover, got caught in traffic and got lost,” Greg said, looking up from his BlackBerry.

  We had to send out a police escort to find our quarterback. They made a path through the traffic and led him to the garage entrance. The valet service had already stopped.

  You know how tall those old Land Rovers are? Well, Drew’s was so tall, he jammed it into the top of the Superdome entryway.

  This is the most important game in the city’s history. It was twenty-five minutes after six. Our starting quarterback had jammed his Land Rover into the parking garage roof. I just hoped this wasn’t a sign for the night.

  As a player and as a coach, at some point or another, you have that nightmare. The national anthem is being played, and you’re two blocks away from the stadium. I knew Drew was dying before the game.

  “Hey, Drew,” I said, needling him a little when he finally arrived. “Glad you were able to join us tonight.”

  When game time finally arrived, the Dome was in a frenzy. Katrina had scattered Saints fans everywhere, but 72,968 somehow managed to find their way to the Superdome. It was a spectacular, New Orleans-style event. Cannons shot black-and-gold confetti. Music filled the air. Green Day and U2 performed “Wake Me When September Ends” and “The Saints Are Coming” and a reworked version of “House of the Rising Sun.” They showed the Katrina video, and everyone got quiet. The Hank Williams Jr. song came up. “What a pleasure it is to welcome you all back inside the Louisiana Superdome,” Mike Tirico told the ESPN audience, which was the network’s largest ever for a sporting event.

  The feeling inside the Dome was absolutely electric. The symbolism was impossible to ignore. After fifty-six weeks, football was returning to New Orleans. Was it too much to hope the city was also coming back to life? The place was fully awash in emotion.

  It was the loudest crowd I’d ever heard in my life. I know I never walked into a stadium feeling like more was riding on the game. The fanfare and the atmosphere were just unbelievable. There were some familiar faces: former President George H. W. Bush, Spike Lee, Harry Connick Jr., Hillary Swank and NFL commissioners Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell. Dallas Mavericks head coach Avery Johnson had a sideline pass.

  But it was longtime Saints fans at home with their team again.

  And not for one single moment did our guys forget why we were there.

  The game got off to an amazing start. On the very first possession, the Falcons went three and out and were forced to punt deep in their own territory.

  Special teams coordinator John Bonamego had convinced me we had a real good punt-block rush. He gave Steve Gleason, my assassin on paintball day, a specific assignment. This was perfect for Gleason. He didn’t have great athletic ability. He didn’t have that much speed. At five foot eleven, 212 pounds, he was definitely on the small side for an NFL player. As a football player, he didn’t have a lot on paper. But you could give Gleason an assignment, and he just had a way of getting it done. If he hit this just right, he could make a kill like he had at paintball.

  I didn’t plan on trying to block a punt so early. But Bonamego didn’t seem eager to wait. “You want to block the first one?” he asked. I knew we wanted to run the block at some point. Teams rush eight and attempt to block punts all the time. But so soon?

  I heard myself say, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  And we did. Eight guys rushed. Gleason hit the A gap, pulled a little loop stunt and went right up the middle to block the punt. It came off the punter’s foot. It hit Gleason.

  Curtis Deloatch fell on the ball in the end zone. It was 7-0, New Orleans. And the roar from the crowd made everything else sound like a whisper.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything in my life louder than that,” Gleason said later.

  Michael Vick had to agree. “I never in my life heard a crowd roar so loud,” Vick said. “It just goes to show the appreciation they have for having the New Orleans Saints back in the Dome, bringing football back to the city. I commend them for that. They deserve it.”

  By the time the game was over, the Saints had won 23-3. Brees had thrown for 191 yards and the glory was spread all around. Deuce McAllister ran for eighty-one yards on nineteen attempts. Reggie Bush had fifty-three yards on thirteen. John Carney kicked two field goals in the second quarter, including a fifty-one-yarder that inched above the cross
bars just as halftime arrived. The Saints’ defense held Vick to twelve completions in thirty-one passing attempts. His runs logged a grand total of twenty-seven yards, not counting a single late-in-the-game thirty-yard run when the Saints were up by twenty.

  “From the moment I signed with the Saints,” Drew said after the game, “I was looking forward to this. It was a great night. It’s something we’ll never forget.”

  “It was so emotional on the sidelines,” Reggie agreed. “We talked all week about making a difference with special teams. Today we put it to work and made it happen.”

  Even Falcons coach Mora had to give us a nod.

  “Hard as it is to lose this game,” he said, “I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a little, little piece of me that really appreciated what this game meant to this city. Unfortunately, we made it way too easy for the Saints.”

  As the fans walked out of the Dome and into the streets, they left with a glimmer of possibility. If the Saints could do this, maybe the city could too.

  Would we have gotten all this credit if we’d lost the football game? Probably some of it. Surely the commentators would have cut us some slack. The fans too. We could have blamed Katrina, right?

  “Whether we would have won that game or not, I think the fans would have still been happy,” receiver Joe Horn said. “If we would have lost, I’m sure they would have still been proud of us. They would have still been happy because this organization is still in New Orleans.”

  But that would not have been enough for the team, Horn said. “We had to win that football game.”

  Mike Ditka, who’d done his own stint as a Saints head coach, said he noticed something new. “What Sean Payton is doing down there is outstanding,” he said the next morning. “This is the beginning of a new era. There’s a whole new enthusiasm.”

  You have no idea how much I was hoping he was right.

  “This night belongs to the city, the state of Louisiana and everyone in the Gulf South,” I told the media after the game.

  We gave the game ball to the people of New Orleans. Native son Avery Johnson accepted on the people’s behalf.

  Who deserved it more?

  17

  CINDERELLA SEASON

  2006 WAS THE SEASON the Saints and New Orleans proved to the world that neither one of us had given up.

  As I rode around the city that fall, I could think of many ways to describe the local conditions. Battered. Devastated. Maddeningly slow to come back. The word I wouldn’t use was normal. There were pockets of hope, for sure. But not nearly enough of them. That’s why having the Saints back home was so important. In those first eighteen months after Katrina, the team stood out like a beacon.

  I’ve heard people argue that 2006 was the most significant season the Saints have ever had, even more important than the Super Bowl season that would come three years later. These people have a point. It was the year of Drew and Reggie and a new breed of player. It was a year of beating expectations and winning in the face of daunting odds. 2006 was the year the Saints made clear they were staying in New Orleans for the long term.

  And suddenly we had some momentum to build on. Three wins and no losses to open the season, we—a team that could barely get on the field the previous year—were leading the NFC South. Amazing! In a city where everything was going slower, costing more and facing setbacks, here were the Saints, back at home and doing better than anyone imagined we would. If 2009 would become a year of jubilation, 2006 was a year of hope.

  Everywhere I went after the return to the Dome, people approached me. Almost overnight, I’d gone from the anonymity of the CVS line and Pat O’Brien’s to someone people recognized and were happy to see.

  “Thank you so much for being here,” they said.

  “We’re so glad you guys are back.”

  Even when we lost in Week Four—21-18 at Carolina—we could hold our heads up. These players were actually in the game. We gave Jake Delhomme and the Panthers a real fight. Deuce McAllister pulled us ahead in the fourth quarter. It just wasn’t quite enough. Carolina answered with two quick touchdowns. We needed more than Brees’s eighty-six-yard touchdown pass to Marques Colston, although that was certainly nice.

  Yes, we lost the game that day. But we weren’t a team of losers. And so it went, game after game.

  We beat Tampa Bay, 24-21, on our first trip back to the Superdome after the big night. On a last-second thirty-one-yard kick by John Carney, we slipped past Philadelphia, also at home, 27-24. The Ravens stopped us in the Superdome, but we turned right around and showed Tampa Bay that our previous Buccaneers victory wasn’t a fluke—and we beat them in their house this time.

  The rough patch came in Weeks Eleven and Twelve. The Steelers beat us in Pittsburgh. The Bengals beat us at home. People began to wonder if our momentum was starting to fade. But after we taught the Falcons a second lesson, this time in Atlanta and then ran past the 49ers in the Dome, even people outside New Orleans were starting to believe.

  And a story line was emerging: Team and City Ravaged by Katrina Shoot to the Top of the NFL.

  What a fairy tale this was turning into! People in New Orleans were pinching themselves.

  Early in the season, people seemed genuinely amazed. “These are the Saints,” callers were saying incredulously on local talk radio. “How can they keep winning like this?”

  “Our biggest test of the regular season came in Week Fourteen. We were facing the Cowboys in Dallas, and interest was high.

  When the schedule came out before the season, we drew one Monday night game: against Atlanta in the dramatic reopening of the Superdome. Everything else was a noon or a one p.m. start. That’s the kind of schedule you get when league officials and the networks don’t think your team will be a factor. Why squander a valuable prime-time audience on an also-ran? But as the season progressed and we kept surprising people, NBC and the NFL called a scheduling audible of their own. The Cowboys-Saints game, they decided, would be moved to Sunday night and given a national prime-time TV audience. At this point in the season, the Chicago Bears were looking dominant. But right behind them in the battle for high play-off seeds were the Cowboys and the Saints.

  Still, most of the commentators agreed: We were going to get slammed in Dallas. The Cowboys were the stronger team. They’d had four years of molding by Bill Parcells’s firm hand. The post-Katrina Saints might be a nice Cinderella story. But hadn’t the Cowboys already clobbered them in the preseason?

  “Coach, your team is playing well, very well,” one reporter said to Parcells in a pregame conference call, sucking up a little, I thought. “You manhandled the Saints team earlier in the preseason. Do you agree you have many advantages this week?”

  I think Bill surprised him. “Whoa! Whoa!” he said. “I think this thing matches up well. I think these teams are even.”

  Now, I’d spent enough time in the Northeast to know that when someone from New York or New Jersey—as Parcells is—insists a contest is evenly matched, he doesn’t believe that at all. He thinks his side has the edge. He’s just saying it’s even so that when he wins, his victory will be that much sweeter.

  “You have to understand the mind-set,” I told our players in one of our final meetings before the game. “He doesn’t give us much chance. Let’s prove him wrong.”

  There’s some background you have to understand here. My second year as an assistant coach in Dallas, Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and I played a round of golf one day against Parcells and Shawn Humphries, the resident pro at the Cowboys Golf Club. As Troy and I pulled further and further ahead, Parcells got madder and madder. He really didn’t like it when Troy and I grabbed a six-pack of Coors Light tall boys for the back nine and began gloating just a little. I remember being pleased by the idea of getting under my beloved mentor’s skin.

  On the Thursday before the Cowboys game, I told our players that story. And I made a promise to them: If we won Sunday night, we’d toast our victory on the plane ride back to New
Orleans with ice-cold cans of Coors Light.

  Technically, that’s not allowed under NFL rules. No alcohol on the team plane. But this was going to be an exception. I alerted James Nagaoka, our travel director, about my postgame intentions.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  James is absolutely the best at what he does. He’d worked with Mickey in Seattle, and he handles some amazingly complex logistics. When he says he’ll take care of something, it gets taken care of.

  We played the game and beat the Cowboys handily in front of the Sunday night crowd. The Cowboys opened impressively with a seventy-seven-yard Julius Jones run. But then we just started racking up the touchdowns: a two-yard run by Mike Karney, a three-yard pass to Karney from Brees, a twenty-seven-yard pass from Brees to Jamal Jones. The Cowboys were clearly a good team, but it was one of those games in which things just kept going right for us. We made more plays than they did. In the third quarter Karney caught another touchdown pass, which we followed with a surprise onside kick. Now there was an interesting idea! We stole possession at the forty and scored two plays later when Devery Henderson caught a forty-two-yard pass and crawled into the end zone.

  Evenly matched or not, we dominated the game. For me, it was a chance to coach against someone I think so much of and have so much respect for—and win.

  Timing matters in a football season. The best time of the week for an NFL coach is from the moment when you win a game until you go to sleep that night. It’s not a large window, but that is your time to enjoy the victory. When you wake up the next morning, you’re off to the next project. You’re grading the tape. You’re making corrections. You may have to travel, depending on whether your next game is home or away. But right after winning a game, before you’re on to the next one—that’s the time a coach has to unwind.