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

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

Dallas hadn’t represented crisis. Dallas was another good team. The loss to Tampa represented the crisis that you’ll face in any season and ours came in Week Sixteen. Crisis. We lost to Tampa Bay. After we lost to Tampa Bay, the Minnesota Vikings lost to the Chicago Bears, which guaranteed us the one seed. So although we had lost the last two games, the New Orleans Saints had secured the one seed that weekend.

  So how would we play Carolina? I had made the comment that we were going to play this game to win, and we needed to get back to basics. We needed to get back on the field and do all these things. And when the Bears beat the Vikings—this was important. That changed things. We had the one seed. We no longer had a perfect season to protect. We were going to rest our players.

  There was all this talk that no team had ever lost the last three games of the regular season and won a Super Bowl. But you had to weigh this. Did we rest our players, win or lose at Carolina, then get ourselves refocused in the bye week and ready for the play-offs? Or did we say, “Full speed ahead and lose another one”? Now, think about that. Did we say, “We’re not gonna take another torpedo here. We took two—Dallas and Tampa. We’re not gonna take a third”? Or did we play to win, risk injury—and possibly lose? Now you’ve taken a third torpedo to the confidence.

  So we rested.

  Lots of the national commentators thought we had to play this game to win. They said we needed it to get our momentum back. Absolutely wrong. That was one of the best decisions we made all season: to rest our starters in that game. It was absolutely foolish to think that we had to play that game. Who says so? We had the one seed already.

  I walked into the TV production meetings for that game. Brian Billick and the guys at FOX Sports were somewhat disappointed. Naturally, if you’re the broadcast crew for that game, you don’t want to have to look through your flip card to see who’s in the lineup. Well, tough. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the interest level you and everyone else have in this game. It means nothing to me or our team.

  The production meeting was short. They were disappointed. They didn’t ask to speak with any players after they spoke with me.

  We lost the Carolina game. Now it’s us versus everyone. We’ve got a crisis here, although the third torpedo wasn’t a direct hit. We’d rested our starters. But no team had ever finished 0-3 at the end of the season and then won a Super Bowl.

  Listen, we can find a statistic in the rich history of forty-three years of Super Bowl football to show anything. Every year, no one’s done this. That being said, we needed to get healthy. We needed to rest. We needed to get ready for whoever we were gonna play next.

  That Carolina decision was tough. But it was absolutely the right decision. Peter King of Sports Illustrated was getting ready to kill us for resting our players. It was the last Thursday before the game, and I said to Peter, “Let me ask you this. All right, I’m gonna play all our starters, and we’re gonna go full-bent—what if we get our ass beat?”

  It was quiet on the phone.

  “I never looked at it that way,” he said.

  Well, you have to.

  27

  WE’RE BACK

  COMING INTO THE PLAY-OFFS, the pressure on us was immense. The shadow of three straight losses. The idea that we’d run out of gas. The notion that, maybe, we had never been as good as our record made people believe. You didn’t hear much of that talk from the local fans. They were thrilled we’d gotten this far. As I walked around downtown, there was almost a giddiness in the air. Despite the late-season fall-off, people were still coming up and saying: “You’re doing us proud!”

  But skepticism was a drumbeat in the national media and from some of the other teams. We certainly understood this was crisis time.

  Lose to the Arizona Cardinals, we’d have had a thirteen-win season and still failed to win a play-off game. If we won, though, we’d be right back in the running for a championship.

  Somehow, we had to get our old swagger back.

  Deuce McAllister was already scheduled to speak to the team on Friday. He was coming to the hotel and was going to part of our pregame buildup. Deuce had played very well three years ago in that game against Philadelphia. We were hoping he might have something inspirational to say.

  At midweek, we had to put defensive tackle Rodney Leisle on injured reserve. That gave Mickey an idea.

  “Why don’t we sign Deuce to the active roster?”

  Deuce hadn’t played a game since the end of the 2008 season. He’d put on quite a few pounds, and his knees were shot. He’d had some financial knocks with a Nissan dealership he owned in Mississippi. But number 26 was still the team’s all-time leading rusher. He’d scored more touchdowns than any other Saint. And he was still beloved by other players and the fans. Who cared if he couldn’t run a wind sprint?

  “It’s a brilliant idea,” I told Mickey. “I can’t think of a reason why we wouldn’t do it.”

  Deuce wouldn’t actually play. He’d be listed as inactive for the game. But we would sign him to the roster. He’d get paid. And he would be an official member of the team. With Leisle out, we had the spot now.

  I got Deuce on the phone.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” I asked him.

  “Give me the good news,” he said.

  “The good news is we’re gonna sign you to the roster. I still want you to speak to the team, but we’re gonna sign you to the roster.”

  Deuce seemed genuinely touched. “Great,” he said when I explained what we were thinking. He wouldn’t just run with the team through the tunnel as an ex-Saint. He wouldn’t be an ex-Saint at all. He would be a Saint, on the roster for the game. Then he asked, a little tentatively: “What’s the bad news?”

  “Well, you’re twenty-six pounds overweight, and I gotta fine you, and that’s gonna cost you more than you’ll make for the play-off game.”

  Deuce thought that was hilarious.

  I broke the news to the team matter-of-factly. Every team meeting starts with an order of business. I might say, “Hey, we signed such-and-such. We waived so-and-so. And I fined the following players.” It’s just business, and then we get into the focus of the meeting. I got that from Parcells. It ensures that nothing goes unmentioned.

  That morning, I said: “Rodney Leisle was placed on IR, and we signed Deuce McAllister, running back, Ole Miss, to the active roster.”

  After a moment of “Huh? What? What did he say?” the players realized they’d heard correctly. An instant buzz swept across the room. These guys loved Deuce, and they knew immediately how fired up the fans would be.

  A Deuce highlights video came up, some of his great moments set to music. The video culminated in that divisional game in 2006. He was magnificent against Philadelphia.

  “Deuce McAllister has always embodied the spirit of the New Orleans Saints and the city of New Orleans,” I told the media. “We’re excited to have him back with the team and to have him lead us out onto the field.”

  Clearly, the other players were thrilled. “Deuce deserves to be here,” Pierre Thomas agreed, echoing what I am certain was the view of every player and every fan. “He deserves to be in this battle.”

  As word spread around the city, people seemed truly thrilled, although some fans read even more into the gesture than Mickey and I—or Deuce—had in mind.

  As I drove home on Friday night, talk radio was buzzing with callers who thought we were really going to put Deuce in the game.

  “Yeah, they’re gonna use him in short yardage. . . . Deuce was always great at the goal line. . . .You watch. They’re gonna have a package for Deuce.”

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” I was saying to myself as I zoomed across the causeway.

  As the one seed, we got a bye for the first week of the play-offs, the equivalent of a guaranteed first-round victory. I’m not complaining about that. But being off for a week, while most of the other teams were playing, brought up some other issues. I knew that how we handled the rhythm of that would set
a tone for everything that followed.

  I’m always looking for fresh models of success. So, of course, I remembered how we had treated the bye week before the Giants game. Instead of using the time to squeeze extra practices out of the players—a coach’s natural crunch-time instinct—I was convinced that Drew’s advice had been right. At that point, push-’em-hard-in-the-bye-week had an 0-3 record. Let-’em-relax was 1-0.

  We brought the players in Monday after the Carolina loss. We had a light practice, then gave them Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off, just like we had in the bye week before the Giants game. Everyone was back for half-day practices on Saturday and Sunday morning, and we spent the afternoons learning who the next-round matchups would be.

  We were tired. We needed a break. That’s not an excuse. It’s just where we were after the New England win, the short week at Washington, Atlanta, Dallas.

  It was us and the Cardinals in the day game on Saturday. We had some concern about their left corner, Dominique Rogers-Cromartie. A second-year player out of Tennessee State, he has amazing ball skills. With Kurt Warner, their passing game was a threat. His play-off numbers were staggering.

  Given all the pressure and the do-or-die stakes, we had to be aggressive, more aggressive than the other team. Three years before, we had given every one of our players a wooden baseball bat before a particularly tough game. We brought the bats out periodically as a point of emphasis. We decided to do it again for Arizona. So after the Deuce announcement on Friday, I handed a baseball bat to every player in the locker room. I knew that taking those bats into the game—figuratively speaking—would make a far bigger impact than another speech from me about the importance of playing hard.

  I didn’t know how literally Reggie Bush would take the whole wood idea.

  The night before the game, at the hotel, seemed like the right time to reinforce some important parts of the message we’d been preaching all year. We made a video featuring all four of the speakers we’d had during training camp: Jon Gruden, Avery Johnson, Ronnie Lott and Bill Mallory. It was like an inspirational greatest hits.

  It was a highlights video. But in the background, you could hear the audio of the training camp talks. It was dark, and there was the voice of Ronnie Lott. You could hear Bill Mallory. You could hear Avery Johnson. The last segment was my old coaching friend Jon Gruden. “One season. One season of your life. One run.” The video ended. The lights came on. And there was Gruden, standing at the front of the room.

  He spoke directly about how far the Saints had come. “We’re in this position now,” he said. “You’ve gotten yourself here. Go finish this thing.”

  Gruden works for ESPN now. It might have seemed a little strange to have a TV commentator addressing one team. He covers thirty-two teams. We didn’t want to make it a big media thing. My thought was “Let’s just keep it in-house.” That being said, Jon hired me into the league. There was a personal tie there. I had worked for him. I felt comfortable with the idea, and so did he. This was Friday night, and the feeling was no different from how I’m sure it was at the Cardinals’ hotel. “We are ready.”

  Reggie Bush was a big reason for our success offensively. He’s a player of enormous dimension. He’s certainly been a great asset on punt returns. But I had felt, as the 2009 season wore on, that Reggie needed to run with more power. We spoke about that during the bye week. The message seemed to have connected with him. As he ran onto the field before the Cardinals game, Reggie looked a little scary with that bat in his hand. He was gripping it as he and Deuce led the team out of the tunnel and onto the field. The instant Deuce was visible from the stands, the Superdome erupted the same way it had been erupting since he arrived as a rookie in 2001.

  “Deuce! Deuce! Deuce!”

  Reggie was pacing around near the bench, still holding that bat, looking like—Well, let’s just say I didn’t want to stand too close to Reggie that night. Right before kickoff, I had to remind him: “Reggie, no baseball bats on the field.”

  And then, on the very first play from the line of scrimmage, Arizona running back Tim Hightower ran seventy yards right through our line for a touchdown. That was the turd in the punch bowl.

  Oh, no! You gotta be kidding me!

  It was John Gilliam in reverse. Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt must have been thinking: “Wow, this is easy!”

  Truly, everything could have collapsed. All we’d been working toward could have evaporated. With that one deflating play, our confidence and our focus very well could have collapsed.

  Could have. But didn’t.

  Back in the middle of the season, I told Reggie, “You’ve gotta have balance here. There will be games you don’t have as many touches. But we need to keep you healthy throughout the season. Then, on the big stage in postseason, you will shine.”

  Reggie shined that night: 217 all-purpose yards. A punt return for a touchdown. A fabulous run to score a touchdown. Brees threw the ball a lot. Cromartie—the guy we were most worried about—got hurt in the first quarter. After that, we started throwing probably 80 percent of the time. The matchups were in our favor.

  All our players performed like we had practiced. They did what they had learned to do. They looked inside themselves, and they saw winners there.

  Will Smith played well. Brees played well. The defense was sharp. Reggie was not only back—he was dynamic. He was the difference in that game. He had the kind of game he got famous for in 2006, finishing with eighty-four yards on five rushes and twenty-four yards on four receptions plus 109 yards on three punt returns. We won convincingly, 45-14.

  And what a world of difference that made. Suddenly, everything brightened up. The streak of defeat—three games and one play—had been broken. The crisis was behind us. The monkey was off our back.

  28

  NEW HEIGHTS

  THE DAY BEFORE THE NFC championship game against the Minnesota Vikings, I could tell I was getting the flu.

  My nose was running. I had the chills. I was feeling even crankier than I usually do the day before a game. Saturday afternoon was downtime for the players and the coaches, a final chance to relax with the family before the game. I had promised Connor I would take him out to play paintball. He was wanting some father-son time. I was feeling achy when I got home from the morning meetings. But there was no way I was canceling our plans.

  Connor and I went out to Paintball Command, my first time since Gleason had nailed me there. My father-in-law, Tom Shuey, came along. We ran around in the woods and got some shooting in. Connor seemed to have fun. But with the paint-gun noise, now I had a headache too. When we got back home, I climbed under the covers and just lay in bed for an hour or so. Then I got up, dressed, had some soup, took some medicine and drove across the causeway for our final round of meetings before the game.

  Here it was, the championship game, and I felt like I was going to die.

  I slept OK at the hotel Saturday night but got up and still felt awful. I got to the Dome a little earlier than normal, about six hours before the game. At the stadium, I had to do something. I got two bags of IVs and then a Toradol shot just to try to feel better. I wore a sweatshirt to ease the chills. And all I kept thinking was, “Here we are in the NFC championship, and I couldn’t feel any worse.”

  I have great respect for Brett Favre and not just because the Vikings quarterback grew up in Kiln, Mississippi, as a big Saints fan. Truly, he’s one of the top two or three quarterbacks ever to play this game. Earlier in the year, when Brett was trying to decide whether to play another season, he and I exchanged some texts. I gave him my two cents about playing until you can’t play anymore.

  “You still have the talent and the ability and the arm strength,” I told him. “If you still have the fire, why not?”

  He made the decision to come back. And periodically during the year, I might get a text from him or I’d text him. “Great job . . . Nice game.” Just friendly stuff. We followed each other’s teams. And now the Saints and the Viking
s were playing one another for the championship, and Brett was the opposing quarterback.

  It might surprise some people that the head coach of one team would think of the opposing quarterback as a friend of his. What can I say? It’s a small industry.

  When I saw Brett before the game, we bumped fists but that’s all. “Look, I’m sick,” I said to him. “I don’t want to give you guys the flu.”

  He smiled and nodded toward Vikings coach Brad Childress and said: “Go over there and give it to Chilly.”

  He was joking. I think.

  The night before the game, Joe Vitt had spoken to the team. That was fairly common on Saturday evenings. He went through our “keys to victory” for this game.

  “Win the turnover battle.”

  “Be the most physical team.”

  “Win the field position through special teams.”

  Ronnie Lott had spoken to the team as well. He’d addressed us in Oakland in the preseason. He was definitely worth a return visit. There was a natural progression to these speakers, bringing the best ones back in the postseason. This was greatest-hits time. Gruden before the Arizona Cardinals game. Now Ronnie Lott.

  When Joe finished his “keys to victory,” a video came up—loud. Aerosmith was singing “Dream On.” And the pictures captured a series of sports triumphs from every realm. Everything from Michael Jordan to Muhammad Ali to the U.S. hockey team beating the Soviets to the Boston Celtics to the Pittsburgh Steelers—this video really captured the essence of sports. We wanted to put ourselves in that winning company.

  Red Auerbach and the Celtics. Jim Valvano at NC State. The U.S. Olympic runners. It went on a while, maybe fifteen minutes, with Aerosmith blasting through the hotel meeting room. It was magnificent. When the video was over, it was totally quiet in the room. Ronnie Lott stood up.

  Ronnie, a Hall of Fame cornerback and safety with the San Francisco 49ers, was one of the best defensive backs ever to play the game. A first-round draft choice from Southern Cal, he was known for his pounding-hard hits.