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

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  Drew says to me: “If we sneak it, Coach, I can get in.”

  We were on the one-inch line. We had just enough time for him to convince me that we could run a quarterback sneak. If it worked, we’d cut their lead to fourteen points before the half.

  Prior to the play, I ran down the sideline and told the line judge, “Hey, we’re gonna run a quarterback sneak. Make sure you see this ball cross the plane because he’s gonna cross the plane.”

  Then I ran back to the bench area, because you’re not supposed to be down the line like that. And sure enough, Brees took the snap and extended the ball over and back, and it’s a touchdown. It was the right call.

  We came back in the second half. We gained momentum. Sharper got an interception for a touchdown. We ended up winning that game. As poorly as we played in the first half, I don’t know that anyone felt we were out of it. But that was a key step in this unbeaten season: We found a way to win even when we didn’t play so well. We ended up winning 46-34. We got to 6-0. That was big.

  The wins kept coming. We played a Monday night game at home against Atlanta. We had three interceptions and won 35-27.

  Week Nine, we had Carolina at home and fell behind again. It was 14-0, and we were able to come back. At 8-0, people started noticing we hadn’t lost a game. At that point, we started battling not just our opponents but this whole idea of a season without a loss. Everyone started drawing attention to our record. And that can be a problem.

  Perfect season? You never want your players to be reading these articles in the paper and hearing these discussions on TV.

  You don’t want to ever lose sight of the process of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That’s the secret here: What we do on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. How we practice. How we compete. How we win. You don’t want anything—certainly not some hype in the media about how unbeatable you are—interfering with that.

  When you listen to Patriots players talk about finishing the 2007 season 16-0, they’ll tell you: That last stretch of five or six weeks was a killer. Now you aren’t just worrying about this week’s opponent. You have the record hanging over your head. That can seep unintentionally into the locker room.

  Thankfully, our team had good veteran leadership. They were committed to not letting that happen. So we beat Atlanta and Carolina, victories that got us closer to winning the division, our first goal.

  As the season wore on, people were saying, “Well, they aren’t winning the same way they won earlier in the year.” St. Louis on the road was a hard-fought game. But if you paid close attention, Buffalo was a hard-fought win too—a close game in the third quarter. Miami was tough. The Atlanta game was close at home. The Carolina game, we were down by fourteen. St. Louis was a close game, and finished with them missing a Hail Mary to beat us.

  Away games are an extra challenge. We’d won a handful, but that’s just not the nature of our game. Tampa Bay at Tampa, we won pretty convincingly, and that was a road game. So we moved to 10-0, and clearly, this unbeaten season now was being discussed—or at least the idea of remaining perfect.

  To the media, we did everything we could to downplay that. “We’ve gotta prepare for the next game. That’s all we’re thinking about.”

  Internally, the idea of a perfect season was discussed with the doors closed. “Just understand how we got to this point.”

  There had been an important meeting early in the year that became relevant. Normally, we would put up the schedule for the players at the beginning of the season—the first four weeks—and talk about finding a way to handle the first quarter of the season. We’d hope to come out of it at least 3-1.

  If you keep that pace going, you’ll finish 12-4.

  But I remembered Brees and a few of the other captains saying, “Coach, when you put up the first quarter, let’s not concede any game. Let’s just look at the opponent.”

  “All right,” I said. “I hear what you’re saying. We’re just gonna look at Detroit. Here’s the first four games, but Detroit is what we’re focused on. We’re not gonna talk about how we’ve got to win three of four here. It’s not like baseball, where a manager might say we’ve got to find a way to split here and then win the next two.”

  And so after the first quarter of the season, it was 4-0. After the second quarter, it was 8-0. And into the third quarter, Tampa and New England were coming up.

  Tampa Bay was a good win. But like the Giants game, New England was one of those incremental hurdles that turn up through the season that can validate your standing as the best in the NFC or a contender to win a championship. Coming back against Miami was important for our team. But New England was in a big spot. A good team with arguably one of the best quarterbacks in football. In that spot on Monday night, we played well again. Against a coach I truly admired.

  25

  CHANNELING BILL

  FROM THE TIME WE got here in 2006, we had closely studied the success of the New England Patriots. That’s not so hard to understand. If you were taking over a failing business, you would want to look closely at the practices of the successful companies in the same industry, especially those competitors who were at the top.

  New England was clearly a team we could learn some lessons from. In Tom Brady, they had one of the top quarterbacks, maybe the top quarterback. They had Bill Belichick as their coach, who is certainly at the top of our game. So we paid a lot of attention to Patriots personnel decisions and how they built a team with character. “What’s their recipe?” I was constantly asking myself. “How are they doing what they do so well?”

  I had never really spent much time with Belichick until the Pro Bowl in early ’07. The coaching staff whose team loses the NFC championship game coaches at the Pro Bowl against the coaching staff whose team lost the AFC game. That would be my crew and Belichick’s. We had lost to the Bears. They had lost to the Colts.

  Bill and his staff had a tremendous amount to teach a young, first-year head coach. I asked questions: “How would you handle that?” I got their impressions of people in the league. Over five or six days, we just spent some comfortable time together. Bill and I laughed about stuff. Beth and I had Meghan and Connor with us in the hotel, and our suite being directly above his, I cringed at the thought of Meghan and Connor bouncing off the beds and rarin’ to go while Bill was reviewing game tape or trying to sleep in. I told him I wished he was in 332-33 and we were in 232-33. We chartered three fishing boats one afternoon and the Patriots’ coaches and the Saints’ coaches went out deep-sea fishing. Just being able to have a Corona and talk with a guy like Belichick, that was invaluable to me.

  It also gave me a chance to develop my Bill Belichick impression. Let me tell you, I do a great Belichick.

  So yes, in our industry, this is a guy you would want to study closely. And all of a sudden, three years later, we’re playing his team in a big Monday night game—a significant game for more than just the record.

  More than just a win or a loss, it was really a game of credibility in our unbeaten season at that point. We were 10-0 when we played the Patriots. And yet the experts were saying, “Well, we’ll see how good they are this weekend.” We had a few players on our team at this point from New England’s roster. Randall Gay and Heath Evans, we acquired as free agents. We traded for David Thomas. Some of these key pieces to our roster were players who had experienced the teamwork, the work ethic, the winning culture, the whole Belichick package of the New England Patriots.

  They had a good feel for how Bill Belichick coached. I remember asking Randall, “How would he handle this?” And we’d spent time with Bill, and now we were getting ready to play against him.

  I knew I could go into the team meeting on Wednesday and point out to the players some of the things we could improve on to win. But rather than me doing that, why not have Bill Belichick come visit our team?

  Why not give our team the chance to hear what Bill Belichick would be telling the Patriots that very morning? I could stand up there and criticiz
e our team. But would the message be clearer if the other coach pointed out our flaws to us?

  He’s the one on Monday night who would be obsessively trying to exploit them.

  OK, maybe he wouldn’t agree to do that, to speak to the opposing team before a big game.

  But I could certainly do it for him.

  I spent some time with Randall, Heath and Dave. We talked about how Belichick would look at us. I watched some tape of Belichick interviews. I made a careful note of how he scrunched up his face and how he tilted his head. I became Bill Belichick. The hair greased over to the side and darkened. The blue hoodie with the New England Patriots logo. The khakis and the tennis shoes.

  To get the voice right, I went on NFL.com Tuesday night and listened to Mike Lombardi interviewing Bill. Listened three or four times until I had that flat, tightly wound, slightly psycho-sounding monotone exactly right.

  And we made a little film.

  It was me as Bill Belichick, speaking to the Patriots about all the things that sucked about the New Orleans Saints. Cutting away to video of every imaginable Saints screwup.

  Speaking in that trademark Belichick monotone, I opened up indicting myself.

  “Tell you what, guys—it’s one thing about this New Orleans Saints team. This head coach, wherever he’s been, they’ve turned the ball over. They’ve turned it over in the Pro Bowl in ’06, when I was with him. They don’t take care of the ball.”

  As I—or Belichick—spoke, the B roll featured some of the Saints’ worst fumbles, most of them committed by guys sitting right there in the room.

  “The quarterback’s undersized. We’re gonna be able to knock down passes inside. We gotta push from the pocket.”

  There was Drew being creamed. And on it went.

  “The tight end—hell, we traded the tight end, Dave Thomas. He can’t block at the point of attack. The halfback, Reggie Bush, is afraid of contact. The wide receivers are guys you have to jam at the line of scrimmage. This Gregg Williams, their defensive coordinator, he gets caught up in all these fancy schemes. And fundamentally they don’t tackle very well.”

  And I went on like that, basically pointing out all these truths about our team. But it wasn’t me saying it. It was Bill. And it wasn’t just the players Bill was ripping. It was me. It was the defensive coordinator, the offensive line coach. We were all getting criticized.

  These are the things that are said when the doors are closed. These are things your opponent says about you.

  “These fuckin’ corners, they’re small. We can go make plays. Randy, this is easy. Tommy, this is a lights-out game for you.”

  As I was playing the tape for our players, you know that Bill was talking to his team in Foxborough, hitting exactly all those keys.

  I went on like that for a full forty minutes.

  When you do something like this, you step out of the norm. You deliver a message that will connect with the team in a much deeper and more profound way.

  It doesn’t always work. As a coach, sometimes you swing, and maybe you hit a foul ball or you miss. You step away from the plate, and you say, “I don’t know what I was thinking, but that wasn’t it.”

  Then sometimes you make solid contact. And every once in a while, you just hit one right out of the park. That’s the truth. And this was one of those. Hit it right out of the park!

  There were a few muffled laughs in the room right at the beginning. But then the video came up of us fumbling the ball. The video came up of us missing tackles. The video came up of us getting a field goal blocked. The video came up of us getting beat deep. And the video was hitting on each of these points. There were six batted-down balls from Brees. There were the turnovers, the tackling, all the things that as a coach you want to talk to your team about. And we put it together, and it was right up on the screen and Belichick talking to the Patriots team about us.

  The humor lasted maybe thirty seconds. Then the room was quiet. Dead quiet.

  Because truly, we were being criticized here in a roundabout way—myself included. I was the first one. “The guy hasn’t taken care of the football since he was hired in ’06. He didn’t do it at the Pro Bowl the week I was with him there. That’s coaching.”

  Message delivered, I would say.

  When we left that meeting, of course there were three people I wanted to see right away. I wanted to see Randall, Heath and Dave.

  “How close was it?” I asked Randall Gay first.

  “I got goose bumps,” he said. “I felt like he was sitting in the Patriot team meeting.”

  The others agreed.

  There’s an old saying: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I believe that to be true.

  We wanted to be like the New England Patriots. We wanted that. No team has done it better. Coaching, quarterback, defense, teamwork—that was the team. They were the champions as far as I was concerned. And on Monday Night Football, the Saints are coming into the Superdome 10-0. People are saying our victories have been lucky. We’re not as good as our record says. Our credibility is on the line. This is who we’ve been modeling ourselves after. This is who we’ve been talking about. And some of those things Belichick or I or whoever was saying—some of those things were true. Hell, all of them were true.

  We still beat his team. Solidly. It was 38-17. They were ahead in the first quarter, 7-3. But we scored another twenty-one points before the half, and the Patriots never recovered. Our defense did a great job. Brees played as well as a quarterback could play. He had a perfect passer rating, which is unheard of in a game like that. By the end of the night, we were 11-0, and something ominous was setting in.

  People were looking ahead at the schedule and saying, “Washington, Atlanta, Dallas. If they can get past Dallas, the Saints really could finish 16-0.”

  I hate that kind of talk.

  26

  CRISIS TIME

  WINNING BEATS LOSING ANY day. We had a couple wins left in us.

  We ended up in a dogfight with the Redskins. We had to make some big plays to come back. They missed a field goal late to give us a chance to send the game into overtime. We won a game we very easily could have lost, maybe even should have lost. And yet we found a way to win it. That was twelve.

  We went back to Atlanta and had a close game there. We ran a fake punt. It didn’t work. Nonetheless, we were able to escape with a win against the Falcons, 26-23. Critics would say we won ugly. OK. But you take the ugly ones too.

  We were tired. Mentally and physically. The pressure was building. The expectations were high. We had played that Monday night game against New England, traveled to D.C. in a short week, got their best shot, traveled to Atlanta, got their best shot. And although we won, we won two close games to get to thirteen wins.

  The good news was that in Washington we had secured the NFC South championship. But a real issue was being raised: Do you rest your players? Or do you play for a perfect season? Rest and lose momentum? Or do you risk injury to finish unbeaten? It’s the risk of injury versus the achievement of finishing unbeaten. That’s really it.

  The Colts at this point were also unbeaten. Bill Polian was wrestling with the same issue. Minnesota was on our heels a game behind. I talked to our players directly about this: “You guys are gonna hear a lot about whether we’re gonna play these last three games to win if we’ve already got the seeding locked up—or whether we’re gonna rest our starters. No one person is gonna make that decision. But our plan—Mickey Loomis, Sean Payton, the coaching staff, the team—we are gonna play to win ’em all.”

  Clearly, the fans wanted us to play for perfection. The media too. But remember, what’s most important is winning the Super Bowl. That being said, we were gonna try to win them all.

  And then we lost to Dallas in a big game on a Saturday night. This really was a big game. I made a mistake. DeMarcus Ware, their talented defensive end, was hurt all week. It was a neck injury. You know how serious those can be. All week, the talk was that he wasn’
t going to play. From a protection standpoint, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have in the event that he did play. Well, he did play. And we—beginning with me—didn’t have an adequate plan from a coaching standpoint for helping Jermon Bushrod.

  There were several reasons we lost the game. That was part of it. So was the perfect-season talk. Tony Dungy, the NBC commentator and retired Indianapolis coach, came out two days before that game and said the Cowboys had no chance. I just cringed when I heard him say that.

  Dallas was a good team, a very good team. One of the best teams we played last year. They were very good defensively. But they were backed into a corner. It was the month of December. They had not exorcised their demons. No one gave them a chance on the road in New Orleans. It was the prefect spot for them. It was a tough spot for us, and we didn’t handle it well. We didn’t coach as well as we needed to, beginning with me. The score was 24-17, and I don’t know that the game was that close.

  No more perfection. We were 13-1.

  We were still playing for the one seed. Minnesota lost that weekend. So we still had that one-game lead. We didn’t have the one seed sewn up. But we were playing Tampa Bay at home, and surely we could beat Tampa Bay.

  There had been a lot of pressure in the past three weeks: “Coach, you guys haven’t played as well as you did earlier in the season. And you lost to Dallas. Do you feel like you guys aren’t doing the same things you did earlier in the year?”—all that BS.

  We went up 17-0 and played a great first half against Tampa Bay. We played well offensively and defensively, did all the things that had gotten us to 13-1. In the second half, it was the opposite. Credit Tampa Bay. They had a big punt return for a touchdown. We drove the length of the field late but missed a field goal. In overtime we couldn’t get the ball back or get them stopped in time. You could point to a number of things. Here’s loss number two. And here’s crisis.