Home Team

by Sean Payton

  We’d be on the team plane. I’d say to the guys, “You gotta fuckin’ hear Imparato this week.” I’d put the speaker on and Mickey, Gregg Williams, Joe Vitt and I would all lean toward my cell phone.

  Every time we go on a trip, it’s, “Hey, did Joey call?”

  “Yeah, wait till you hear it.”

  We went to Detroit. This was just before Christmas 2008. The Lions hadn’t won a game all year. We were 7-7. They were 0-14.

  Joey had some thoughts.

  “Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, baby—now pay attention,” he said. “This week’s fuckin’ easy. I’m puttin’ this week on coaching. Now listen to me, you guys are way the fuck better than the DEE-troit Lions, but if you go in there and fuckin’ fart around for a quarter and a half and lose this game, you’ll have a shit-eatin’ Christmas. Tell these fuckin’ guys they gotta come in and”—Joey delivered one of his better rants.

  We were on the plane. It was hilarious. It was awesome. “You’ll have a shit-eating Christmas.” Who says that?

  When we got to the hotel in Detroit, I went to see the banquet manager and asked: “Can you get me a loudspeaker system in the team meeting room so I can hold this phone up to the microphone and have everyone hear it clearly?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.”

  We had our pregame meeting, and as we were winding down, I said: “Look, some of you haven’t met this guy. Some of you may have seen him at a practice. I went to high school with him.” I gave them a little rundown of Joey’s background—the casino work, the mysterious accident, the weekly phone calls. “He follows us very closely, and every Thursday I get one of these calls. It’s his message to you guys.”

  A few players looked sideways, not quite sure what to make of the concept of getting advice from one of the coach’s hometown pals. But they humored me.

  I went on. “I listen. I chuckle. Sometimes it’s humorous. Sometimes he’s right on. Other times, he’s way off base. But I want to play this one for you. He’s dead-on here. Joey Imparato.”

  I hit PLAY on the voice mail, and there was Joey’s voice.

  “If you don’t fuckin’ get off the fuckin’ plane ready to kick some ass, it’ll be your worst fuckin’ Christmas—you go get their ass. You hear me? You tell these fuckin’ guys it’s all on the coaches—every one of your fuckin’ coaches better get their guys goin’.”

  The players were just howling at Joey’s advice. I’m not sure if it was Joey’s language, his accent or the sharpness of his insights. Probably some combination of all three.

  But let me tell you, Joey connected that day.

  And as Joey would put it, we kicked the shit outta Detroit that week. It was 42-7, fuggedaboutit! I’m not sure how much credit Joey deserves. But his inspirational words certainly didn’t hurt.

  Of course Joey heard about what I had done. He doesn’t miss too much. And it only encouraged him. “Coach, hear me out now,” he said the following week, which was the Carolina Panthers at home. “This is a two-part deal here…” And Joey was on to the next game.

  Joey was never going away.

  23

  SEEKING PERFECTION

  THERE IS NO SUCH thing as a perfect game, much less a perfect season. Football is a complex human endeavor, encompassing a nearly infinite number of decisions, calls, moves, plays and strokes of luck. There is no way to do everything perfectly. So even if a team wins 50-0, that doesn’t mean every player did what he was supposed to. It doesn’t mean every play call was right. It doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned and improvement to be made.

  In football as in life, perfect is an ideal—and remains one.

  That said, every game will have a winner and a loser, and the record book counts a win as a win. So as each new season draws near, greatness as defined by a long string of victories is always a genuine hope if not an actual possibility. So it was with the 2009 New Orleans Saints.

  And we weren’t just dreaming this time.

  There are only thirty-two teams in the National Football League. Each year, two or three of those teams will make a crucial leap from 8-8 into the postseason play. As we moved into the 2009 season, we had two strong reasons for hoping one of those teams would be us.

  We felt like our off-season acquisitions were going to help us. We had signed Darren Sharper and Jabari Greer. Jeremy Shockey, Jonathan Vilma and Tracy Porter were going to be healthy. These were key improvements at key positions.

  And we hired Gregg Williams. That was huge. We needed someone who could bring a little swagger to the defense, someone who could raise the confidence level a bit, someone who could help us build a truly complementary game.

  During our 8-8 ’08 season, many people had been saying, “They were first in the NFL in offense. If only they had a defense.” The reality was not quite so one-sided. We had failed offensively at Washington to convert a third and short and close that game out. We had failed offensively at Denver to take advantage of field position. We had failed offensively in a handful of games in our ability to run the football. Those failures also hurt our defense.

  So it wasn’t just the D half of our team that had created disappointment.

  Still, while we worked to sharpen our running game, we needed new leadership on defense. I had to fire Gary Gibbs, our defensive coordinator, and that was hard. Gary was the first person I had hired. We’d flown to New Orleans on Mr. Benson’s plane and checked in to that seedy hotel where the furniture kept falling apart. Gary was still waiting for that six a.m. wake-up call. Together, he and I had laid down the don’t-blame-Katrina rule.

  But I was convinced Gregg Williams was the guy.

  Gregg had spent the year in Jacksonville, and it hadn’t been a good fit for him. I’d never met him before, but I had seen Gregg when he was with the Redskins and I was with the Giants and the Cowboys. He was always tough. He brought real confidence. And people around the league respected him. I would not describe him as wild. But he definitely had an ego. And he was fearless about saying what was on his mind.

  Other teams were interested in hiring him—Green Bay and Tennessee and Houston. But he liked the idea of coming to New Orleans with Drew Brees. As defensive coordinator, he knew he would have that support offensively. And we also had a position we could offer his son, who had graduated from Princeton and was working as a coaching assistant in Jacksonville.

  But there was a money issue. In our league, $1.5 million for a high-end defensive coordinator is not considered crazy money or way too high. Some might argue it’s a pretty good deal for a team. But we had a set budget to work within and not much wiggle room. The offer was $1.25 million.

  Mickey and I were having this discussion on a Friday night. I had a few beers in me. I had just signed a new contract for myself. I guess I was feeling flush. “Take $250,000 out of my salary,” I told Mickey. “And let’s get it to that million-five number. Let’s not lose out on this opportunity over $250,000.”

  I wanted Mickey and Mr. Benson to see the confidence I had in my decision to hire Gregg.

  I understand the ownership pressures here. You bring in a new guy. For some period, you’re still paying the salary of the guy who left, whose contract still has time on it. So it’s easy for me to say, “We want to get this guy”—but there’s a lot that goes into it. I just wanted to say, “Hey, I feel strongly about the decision.”

  Mickey spoke to Mr. Benson and called me back.

  “We’ll do this,” he said. “We’ll make the offer.”

  “That’s just for year one,” I said, making sure my gesture of confidence didn’t run too far out of control. “Not every year. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.”

  When I woke up on Saturday morning, my wife said to me: “You did what?”

  Gregg, to his credit, never said anything about the money to me. Not until we were on the field after the Super Bowl, waiting for the trophy to be presented, would he allude to it at all.

  “I never brought up the money,” he said.


  “I know you didn’t,” I told him.

  “I appreciate that,” he said.

  “I know you did,” I said. “Listen, it was worth it.”

  Enough said.

  One other fact made it easier for me to be gracious. At the end of the season, Mr. Benson wrote me a check to cover what I’d pitched in. I think he wanted to do that at the start of the season. I don’t think he paid me back just because we were winning. “He just was appreciative that you felt that strongly about the decision,” Mickey said.

  So Gregg’s arrival was a big reason for the optimism. From the start, he was working well with the defensive coaches who were already with us. He meshed well with Joe Vitt. There was a better balance now on the team. The secondary got a face-lift. The leadership had changed. The attitude had changed too.

  Yet honestly, before a season ever starts, you don’t know how it’s going to end up. In ’06, I would have told you we were only gonna win three games, and we went to the NFC championship game. And our schedule was a tough one. We had the AFC East—the Patriots, the Dolphins, who had just won their division, the Jets and Buffalo. That’s a strong division. And we had the NFC East—Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Those were arguably two of the better divisions in our game.

  With Williams finally on board, we opened well against Detroit at home, 45-27. Then we went immediately to Philadelphia to play the Eagles. This game was the game that really put us on a roll.

  In four years, we had played the Eagles three times—twice by schedule and once in a play-off game. All those games were in the Superdome.

  But having coached in Philadelphia, I know something about Eagles fans. This ’09 game was maybe my eighteenth time preparing to play in Philadelphia. Andy Reid is excellent. The Eagles are extremely well coached, the most successful team in the NFC over the past ten years. And going into Philadelphia is the antithesis of going to a place like Green Bay with all their bratwurst hospitality. The Philadelphia welcome to a visiting football fan is more like: “We really don’t fuckin’ want to see you on game day.” It’s even worse for an away team that has come to Philly for a game.

  I warned the players a week before the game.

  “This is gonna be a little different for some of you who haven’t been to Philadelphia before,” I said. “The four buses are gonna come off the highway. We’ll do a loop around the stadium. As we come back to the basketball arena and we’re getting closer to the Linc [the Lincoln Financial Center], we will pass a group of tailgaters. A large group of tailgaters. A big parking lot. And I promise you, bus number one is getting at least four eggs. Now bus number four, you might get more. But I promise you, bus one’s getting four eggs.”

  I explained a bit of what I had learned while coaching in Philly and playing there over the years. And I’d lived there a few years as a kid. We lived in Newtown, Pennsylvania, from the time I was seven until I was thirteen. Before we moved to Naperville, which I still consider home, we were outside Philly. So I knew something about the history and the local temperament.

  “These people are masters at being miserable,” I said. “These are the people who boo Santa Claus.”

  I made a prediction: “It’ll start with the eggs being thrown at the buses,” I told the team.

  “But I’ll say this: There’s no more gratifying city to win in on the road than Philly. And after we win this game, we’re gonna take two laps around the stadium on our buses before we head to the airport because we can’t get enough of people pissed off at us and flipping us the bird.”

  Now, as a coach, there is nothing better than telling your players something is going to happen, and then it happens just like you said. You gain instant credibility with the team.

  So sure enough, we pulled around the corner, and here’s the parking lot and there are the tailgaters and—Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Five eggs.

  “Coach! Coach!” the players were shouting.

  “What did you think? I was lying to you?” I asked.

  Two of the eggs were thrown by what must have been a nine-year-old boy. And his father was holding the carton. Learned behavior, I believe this is called.

  So we pulled around. We went into the stadium. We played a close game in the first two quarters. It was 17-13 at the half. And then we really pulled away. It was a big win for us: 48-22. On the road against Philly! That was a huge win for us.

  We’re back in the locker room. We gave away the game ball. We showered. We got on the buses. And I told the driver, “Two laps around the stadium.”

  We only got one.

  The motorcade that was taking us to the airport, they were Philly. The police escort, Philly. I told the players, “If you didn’t recognize somebody already, if you’re not used to seeing them Monday to Friday, they’re Philly.” And all these Philly people, they take their losses very personally.

  They were not about to give us a double chance to gloat.

  We took one lap around the stadium. Then it was right out on the highway to the airport.

  24

  PRESSURE COOKER

  THERE IS NO TEAM in this league that can’t beat you. You can never forget that.

  We arrived in Buffalo after that big win in Philly. It was a game that you would look at on paper and say: “That’s a win. We should win that game.” And yet traveling to Buffalo is always a challenge. We had a crisis that week that developed and revolved around our defensive line.

  We had a player who was late for a meeting—Bobby McCray. On Thursday, I called the team up and really challenged the defensive line. Will Smith, Charles Grant, Bobby McCray and the tackles. I really got after them, the idea that we’re not ready for this game. The response was a hard-fought game, but a win in which we played well defensively. I don’t know that the Bills had a first down in the second half.

  So we were 3-0 with two road wins. Road wins are big in our league. No one was talking about a perfect season yet, but the term “big game” was being thrown around in the media. “This is gonna be a big game!”

  Well, if you’re going to be a good team, you’ll be playing in lots of big games that are bigger than the one that was supposed to be a big game.

  Week Four. The Jets in the Superdome. That was a big game. We fought and won another tough game. 4-0. The Giants were next. That was a bigger game. Like us, the Giants were unbeaten.

  But we had a bye week before the game.

  The bye week was an issue. In previous seasons, we had gone 0-3 in games immediately after a bye week. We just didn’t play well coming off a bye week.

  That was casting a shadow over our preparation for the Giants game.

  There’s a tent underneath the Dome where the players, the coaches and their families go to take a deep breath and relax after a game. We were in the tent after we beat the Jets. Everyone was asking how long the players would get off, what the bye schedule would be like. Drew and Brittany were talking to Beth and me.

  Drew was lobbying for giving the guys a little more time off. Your instinct as a coach is not to want the players gone so long. But Drew made a good argument.

  “Hey,” he said, “we haven’t played well with our current bye schedule. If we want to do something we’ve never done before, we’ve gotta do things we’ve never done before.”

  I liked that. “If we want to do something we’ve never done before, we’ve gotta do things we’ve never done before.” That could apply to a lot of things around here.

  Of course the wives both agreed with Drew. Three to one, I’m outnumbered here. Drew had a good pulse for where the players were.

  We brought the players in for a day after the game and then got ’em outta there for four or five days straight. Took the rest of the week off. Normally, we would have brought them back on Wednesday. We didn’t get them back until the weekend.

  We had a couple good practices on the weekend. Monday, we got a bonus day in.

  Tuesday the players were off—normal routine—and here we got in
to our game week schedule.

  Getting this rhythm right was important. The issue would come up again, twice in the postseason, at the start of the play-offs and before the Super Bowl. Both times, we had a weekend off. We couldn’t let that stall our momentum.

  We played very well against the Giants. We did two things we had never done before: We changed the rhythm, and we won. That win gave us instant credibility because the Giants were perceived by many at that point in the season as the team to beat in the NFC.

  They struggled later. But we beat a 4-0 team, beat them convincingly. And the way we won the game was significant. Gregg Williams was making a difference. We kept turning the ball over defensively. We were leading the league in team takeaways. Some people had been asking, “Is this just a fluke? Are the Saints as good as their record?” That was answered with that Giants win.

  There wasn’t talk of a perfect season. Not yet. Not at 5-0. The talk was “You’re one of the players now in the NFC.” There was Philly. There were the Vikings, who were playing well at that point. There was a handful of teams being discussed. We were one of the four or five.

  Week Seven was a road game in Miami. We were playing last year’s AFC East champion at home. They were well coached by Tony Sparano. We’d spent three years together in Dallas. It’s Parcells, and it’s a physical team. We fell behind immediately. Late in the second quarter, we were down 24-3. It was not a promising start, and it really was unexpected. Up to that point in the season, we had barely been behind at all. We hadn’t played from a deficit. We beat the Giants, and up until that point we’d been ahead in every game we’d played. Every one.

  A play got reviewed and gave us the ball inside Miami’s one-yard line with just a few seconds left in the half. We were going to kick a field goal. But because of the challenge, there was a delay, and we didn’t score, so were gonna kick the field goal.

  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.