by Jeff Duncan
Payton received a bachelor’s degree in communication from Eastern Illinois, but he received his PhD in football communication from Parcells. The latter taught Payton how to run and lead an organization.
“The one thing with Bill was there were never any hidden punches,” Payton said. “You always knew where you stood with him. I think players appreciate that. So it’s just telling them the truth.
“Sometimes, even if it’s a veteran player, it may not be what they want to hear. But it might be what’s necessary for them to hear. With Bill, there weren’t any protected, pet cats or anything like that. Everyone was above the radar, and he was fair. It was a lot easier that way than trying to pretend to be fair.”
Payton has an entire wall of his office dedicated to Parcells. Among the framed pictures and letters is one large photograph of Payton and Parcells coaching on the Cowboys sideline, with an autographed inscription from Parcells: “I am grateful for your help and prideful in your accomplishments and looking forward to your future. My best, Bill Parcells.”
And to this day, Parcells’ influence remains with Payton and throughout the Saints facility. He remains Payton’s most trusted adviser and even makes recommendations on personnel. It was Parcells who tipped the Saints to the talents of undrafted free agent Tommylee Lewis before the 2016 NFL Draft. Payton usually talks to Parcells at least once a week during the season, often on Monday morning phone calls.
“I’ve said this before,” Payton said. “There’s a lot of on-the-job training. Daily, there might be something personnel-wise from an organizational standpoint, practice schedules, training camp schedules, whatever. He knows how to win, and I learned an awful lot in a short period of time. I look back on my career and I was touched by so many people that were successful and they’re a big reason why I’m here right now. I’m humbled by that.”
5. Child of Destiny
On January 15, 1979, Andrew Christopher Brees was born into the sport of football.
His maternal grandfather, Ray Akins, was a legendary coach at Gregory-Portland High School and finished his career as one of the winningest coaches in Texas prep history. His uncle, Marty Akins, was an All-Southwest Conference wishbone quarterback at Texas, where he started for two years in the same backfield as Earl Campbell. Both are members of the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame.
Football wasn’t just a sport to Brees. It was a way of life.
Brees’ parents, Mina and Eugene “Chip” Brees, were lawyers and excellent athletes themselves. Mina was a four-sport standout and all-state basketball player at Gregory Portland High School. Chip, meanwhile, played basketball at Texas A&M, where he met Mina when she was a cheerleader.
With a heritage like that, athletics were a part of Brees’ life from the outset. And there was hardly a sport he couldn’t master. Mina, a singles player for Austin city championship teams in 1995, introduced Drew to tennis, and he became one of the best junior players in Texas, earning a No. 3 ranking in the USTA’s age-12 group. That same year he set an Austin city record with 14 home runs in Little League and was chosen to play on a youth soccer select team.
Drew and his younger brother, Reid, would spend their summers attending two-a-day preseason practices at Gregory-Portland. But Drew didn’t start playing football until high school, primarily because Mina was leery of the sport. She had seen how a knee injury derailed her brother, Marty’s, career and didn’t want something similar to happen to her boys.
“I had witnessed my brother’s career come to a screeching halt,” Mina Brees told the Austin American-Statesman in 2002. “I was a little leery of…kids playing tackle football too early.”
Chip and Mina divorced in 1987, when Drew was eight and his brother Reid was six. Both parents remarried. Mina was married for 10 years to Harley Clark, a state district court judge and former Texas yell-leader who is credited with inventing the famous Hook ’em Horns salute. Chip married Amy Hightower, whose father, Jack, was a congressman from north Texas and later a state Supreme Court judge. The couple received joint custody of the children, and the boys split their time between both homes.
“There’s absolutely no way that a divorce cannot affect children or any of the people who are intimately involved,” Mina said in a 2000 Lafayette Journal and Courier story. “I do think they became more adaptable and more mature earlier because of that. They had to become more responsible.”
In 1993, Brees enrolled at Westlake High School, located in West Lake Hills, an exclusive suburb west of Austin. Westlake was an academic and athletic powerhouse. The Chaparrals won state titles in seven different sports before Brees arrived, and the school regularly was listed among the top high schools in the nation in rankings by Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Brees played football, basketball, and baseball, where he was a power-hitting infielder and a right-handed pitcher with an 88-mph fastball.
Brees was not an immediate football prodigy. As a freshman he played on the B team, and as a sophomore he found himself stuck behind Jonny Rodgers on the junior varsity. Rodgers was the younger brother of Jay Rodgers, a star who went on to play at the University of Indiana, and the son of Randy Rodgers, then in charge of recruiting for John Mackovic’s staff at the University of Texas. That August, Brees grew so discouraged he threatened to quit the team so he could concentrate on basketball and baseball. Brees was dissuaded by a pep talk from his mother, and a few days later Rodgers injured his knee during a scrimmage.
“If Jonny hadn’t got hurt, I don’t know if Drew would have ever had a chance,” Westlake varsity coach Ron Schroeder told the Austin American-Statesman. “I never heard anyone talk about him as a starting quarterback, then all the sudden he had to be the starter when Jonny got hurt.”
In Brees’ first JV game he completed 9 of 10 passes for 315 yards and four touchdowns. The Westlake JV didn’t lose a game that season. The next season he led the Chaparrals varsity to a 12–0–1 record before suffering the first major injury of his career. In a regional playoff game at Alice, Texas, Brees tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee while running a bootleg. His season was over and so was Westlake’s a week later.
“That was a big, defining moment,” Brees said. “I had seen other athletes tear their ACLs and not come back the same. It really scared me at the time. At the time, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do, both mentally and physically. It was more so mentally getting over the hurdle of coming back from something that I thought at the time was pretty devastating and coming back and having my best year.”
Brees had surgery in January 1996 and attacked the rehab process. He was fully recovered when his senior year started but still wore a large brace on his surgically repaired knee as a precaution. Brees led the Chaps to a 16–0 record and the Class 5A Division II state title, the first in school history.
The night of Westlake’s 55–15 state championship romp over Abilene Cooper at Texas Stadium in Dallas, the team returned to Westlake High and there were throngs of people waiting outside the locker room, including autograph-seeking youngsters. One by one, his teammates came out to sign the championship T-shirts, but Brees was nowhere to be found.
“Drew was so sentimental about his last time in that locker room as a player, he did not want to come out,” Amy told the Journal and Courier.
As a senior, Brees passed for 3,528 yards and 31 touchdowns with a 63 percent completion rate. He was named the Class 5A offensive MVP award and finished his career with 5,416 passing yards and 50 touchdowns.
“My biggest memory is that there was never a down or distance so foreboding that we didn’t think we could get it,” Westlake team doctor and longtime family friend Newt Hasson told the Waco Tribune-Herald in 2011. “We always knew Drew could come through. If it were third-and-30, he’d get 31 yards. If it were fourth-and-14, he’d get 15 yards. There was never any doubt that he would get whatever yardage we needed to keep the chains moving.
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College scouts and recruiting analysts were less impressed. Despite his gaudy numbers at the highest level of Texas prep football, Brees was not listed in SuperPrep’s Texas 102 as a senior, nor did he make the 100-player All-Southwest Team in Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report.
Hometown Texas didn’t recruit Brees at all. The Longhorns sent him just one form letter and never called him once. Texas A&M, his dream school because of his parents’ ties, flirted with him for a couple of months but showed more interest in his Westlake teammate Seth McKinney. Texas A&M coaches told him he was their backup plan in case their top target, Major Applewhite, a highly ranked prospect from Baton Rouge, chose elsewhere. Mina Brees even took it upon herself to personally call some college coaches, but every coach told her he was set at quarterback.
“I was a skinny, runt-looking kid,” Brees said. “I just had my knee surgery a couple of months before and had this big ole brace on [my leg]. I wouldn’t have recruited me, either.”
In the end, Brees’ only Division I scholarship offers came from Purdue and Kentucky, a pair of schools known more for their basketball programs than football prowess. Brees picked Purdue because of its Big Ten affiliation and strong academic reputation. Even when Applewhite spurned A&M for Texas and the Aggies made late advances, Brees stuck with his decision. It proved to be a fortuitous call.
The Boilermakers’ new coach, Joe Tiller, was an offensive guru, one of the innovators of the spread offense. When he took the job, he promised fans the Boilermakers would play an exciting brand of offensive football. He called it “basketball on grass.”
When Brees arrived at Purdue, there were six quarterbacks on the roster. His goal was to redshirt and maybe make the travel squad. But one by one, the players ahead of him fell by the wayside. Senior John Reeves switched to defense, redshirt freshman Clay Walters and true freshman Jim Mitchell transferred, and true freshman Ben Smith switched to the secondary.
That left senior Billy Dicken as the starter and Brees as the backup. Brees played sparingly as a freshman, but by the spring of his sophomore year, he was the only experienced quarterback on the roster and he took 90 percent of the snaps in practice.
When it was time to make his collegiate debut, Brees was more than ready. With his pinpoint accuracy and quick decision-making, Brees thrived in Tiller’s pass-happy offense and burst on the college scene. Tiller’s innovative attack and Brees’ innate field generalship were a match made in passing heaven.
In his first season as a starter, he threw for more yards (3,983), more touchdowns (39), and a better completion percentage (63.4) than more heralded peers Donovan McNabb of Syracuse, Akili Smith of Oregon, Cade McNown of UCLA, Joe Germaine of Ohio State, and Michael Bishop of Kansas State. And he led Purdue to a 9–4 season, capped by an Alamo Bowl victory over Bishop and K-State.
He took the offense to another level in his junior season. In a 31–24 loss to Wisconsin, Brees attempted an NCAA-record 83 passes, completing an NCAA-record-tying 55 of them for 494 yards. In a 56–21 win against Minnesota, he went 31-for-36 for 522 yards and six touchdowns.
As a senior, he led Purdue to its first Rose Bowl appearance in 34 years and its first Big Ten title since 1967. And along the way, he set two NCAA records, 13 Big Ten records, and 19 school records. Brees won the Maxwell Award as the nation’s top collegiate player and was a two-time finalist for the Heisman Trophy. He finished his career as the Big Ten’s all-time passing leader with 11,792 yards and 90 touchdowns, numbers that still stand atop the conference’s career rankings today.
In the spring of 2001, as Brees prepared for the NFL Draft, he encountered similar criticisms to the ones he heard as a senior at Westlake. Once again, Brees found himself in prove-it mode.
NFL scouts worried about his lack of height, pedestrian speed, and average arm. Some believed he was the product of Tiller’s system, which tended to turn average quarterbacks into world-beaters. Billy Dicken, who started during Brees’ freshman season, played sparingly before Tiller arrived, but passed for 3,136 yards and 25 touchdowns in his one season as a starter under Tiller and was named first-team All-Big Ten.
Years earlier, Tiller’s offense had produced another record-setting quarterback named Josh Wallwork. At the University of Wyoming in 1996, Wallwork led the nation in total offense but never cracked the NFL. Instead, he toiled in the Arena Football League.
At the time, the comparisons to Brees seemed valid. Both were undersized, athletic quarterbacks with quick decision-making skills. But off the field, the two quarterbacks could not have been more dissimilar. Wallwork lacked the intangibles that made Brees so special. Wallwork’s drug problems eventually destroyed his career and led to an eight-month jail sentence for meth possession.
Still, Wallwork’s success caused some football people to wonder if Brees was also a product of Tiller’s system.
“I think it’s a combination of both [the system and the player],” Minnesota coach Glen Mason said at the time. “I don’t have as short a memory as a lot of people. That offense didn’t take off just when Drew Brees came. The senior [Dicken] that didn’t play [prior to Brees]. He really performed well in that system. I think it’s a combination of a really talented quarterback that’s running an offense that’s suited for him. It’s a great marriage.”
Tiller, though, insisted Brees would star in any system and told every NFL scout as much when they visited campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, to evaluate Brees.
“Certainly our system is user-friendly and he happens to be the user right now,” Tiller said in 2001. “If you want to put a percentage on it, I really don’t know. I just know that he’s the right guy for our system, particularly at this time. But the system is not making Drew Brees.”
Brees fared well at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. He measured 6’0⅛” in bare feet. His time of 4.85 in the 40-yard dash was below par but far from awful. His vertical jump of 32 inches was above average, and his hand size (10.25-inch width) ranked in the top 10 percent of quarterbacks. His ball speed of 68 miles per hour on his passes topped the quarterback class that year, according to Tom Braatz, the director of college scouting for the Miami Dolphins.
“Drew has been a very productive quarterback in college,” Rick Spielman, the Dolphins’ vice president of player personnel, told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 2001. “Everybody knows the biggest question on Drew is whether you can live with the height or not. We’re going to have to sit down and make a decision on that if it’s Drew Brees or whomever may slip down to where we’re at.”
That year, Atlanta (No. 5 overall selection), Carolina (No. 11), Kansas City (No. 12), and Miami (No. 26) were all in need of quarterback help in the draft. All passed on Brees. Only Atlanta, which traded into the No. 1 slot to select Michael Vick, took a quarterback. Brees slid out of the first round. Brees had heard pre-draft scuttlebutt that the Dolphins would select him at No. 26, but they chose cornerback Jamar Fletcher instead.
The San Diego Chargers were the beneficiaries. General manager John Butler orchestrated a draft-day trade with Atlanta to send the No. 1 overall pick to the Falcons for the No. 5 and No. 67 picks. The Chargers used the No. 5 selection to take running back LaDainian Tomlinson and the No. 67 pick to take cornerback Tay Cody. With their future franchise running back in their pocket, they rolled the dice that Brees would fall to them in Round 2. Their gamble paid off. The Chargers selected Brees with the first pick of the second round, No. 31 overall.
The selection of Tomlinson and Brees will go down in history as one of the best draft hauls in NFL history. Two overlooked prospects from the state of Texas. One a Hall of Fame running back. The other a future Hall of Fame quarterback.
6. Alike Yet Different
It didn’t take long for Payton to realize he had a kindred spirit in Brees. During the bye week of their first postseason together in New Orleans, Payton and his staff were working on a Friday afternoon
at the team’s practice facility in suburban Metairie. Coaches use the open date in the schedule to self-scout tendencies and evaluate their offensive and defensive efficiency. The Saints staff was breaking for the weekend around 1:30 pm when Payton looked out the window of his second-floor office and noticed a lone figure on the practice field. It was Brees, dressed in a T-shirt and practice shorts and holding a football near the far end zone.
Curious, Payton and offensive coordinator Doug Marrone scrambled downstairs to inquire. As the coaches approached the field, they noticed him conducting passing drills on air, dropping back, going through his progressions, and throwing to imaginary teammates.
“What are you doing?” Payton asked.
“I’m just trying to stay in my routine so my body is still in condition,” Brees explained. “I’m going through a game in my mind, visualizing our offense against the Eagles defense. I’m just going through different reads and throws and putting myself in different situations.”
Payton looked at Brees incredulously. In 20-plus years of coaching, this was a first.
“Well, I hope we’re winning,” Payton said.
As the coaches walked away, Payton shook his head. Bye weeks are sacred for NFL players, a time to escape the mental and physical grind of the season and recharge their batteries. It had been a long season so far for Saints players and coaches. They had endured a grueling training camp at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, a Bataan Death March of practices in the unrelenting heat and humidity. The exhibition season and early regular season schedule had taken the Saints to Denver, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, and overseas to London. The open date before the divisional playoff game against the Philadelphia Eagles was only the second extended break the team had enjoyed in five months. And yet, here was Brees, alone on the practice field, throwing imaginary passes to imaginary receivers on his day off.
