by Sean Payton
“Hey, Coach,” he said, “this fake-punt thing—it’s—I don’t know. There’s so many different looks. It’s a mixed bag and—”
“I got it,” I said. “All right, I got it. You guys don’t want to run a fake punt. I get you.”
That was important information. They didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. They told me what I needed to hear. So we began down a different avenue. What else could we do here? How else were we going to take a possession away? Everybody was trying to puzzle this out. I was convinced that winning the turnover game really might make the difference for us in the Super Bowl. The Colts had a very methodical offense. But they couldn’t make yardage, and they couldn’t score points anytime we managed to snatch the ball. Near the end of the bye week, Greg and Mike came to me. This was Friday. We were still in New Orleans. Greg said, “What do you think about an ambush onside kick?”
An onside kick—not as a desperation move late in the half or the game, but at some point that the other team thought you had no reason to do it.
We had used the play once before, in 2007 against Jacksonville. It was a team that was leading early. We ran the play in that game, the ball literally hit the turf and three of our guys were on it. There wasn’t a Jaguar uniform within ten yards.
It was worth a look at least.
Thomas Morstead—our punter, who also handled kickoffs—started practicing the kick. He was a rookie with a powerful right leg and excellent aim.
The technique isn’t so different from kicking a soccer ball. With the receiving team expecting a long, high kick ending up back near their end zone, Morstead would have to kick the ball hard to the left, making sure it went at least ten yards past the line of scrimmage. That’s the rule. To be legal, an onside kick has to go at least ten yards past the line of scrimmage. But the ball had to stay close enough to us that our guys had a good chance of grabbing it.
I was encouraged by what I saw Thursday, Friday and Saturday in New Orleans. Every time we ran the play in practice, the ball landed perfectly. Morstead could land the ball where he wanted to and do it repeatedly. Anthony Hargrove and the other guys on the kickoff unit were getting psyched. They knew they could beat the Colts to the ball. They weren’t even thinking about the possibility of not recovering the ball.
I liked that.
Pretty soon, the players were almost challenging me. “You won’t call this,” Hargrove said. “You won’t call this in the Super Bowl.”
Clearly, they were learning to push my buttons.
We were counting on Morstead’s technique, of course. But we were also counting on our line. They had to turn and shut up the return. We couldn’t afford to be flat-footed at the moment of impact. If we were, the Colts would be able to take a step, react and then it would just be a fifty-fifty proposition as to which team ended up with the ball.
I was looking for better than even odds. Much better.
31
SUPER PSYCH
WHILE MIKE ORNSTEIN WAS spreading Saints gris-gris across South Florida, I was planning my own special ops for the team. Bill Parcells had a few ideas to share.
“Do not wait an extra minute,” he said. “Get ’em in here and fuckin’ practice. When the Colts are just arriving, you have a practice already under way. You’ll be pissing on their turf before they even get there.”
It was raining on Monday after the players checked in to the team hotel. I didn’t give them much time to play with their fancy new camcorders. We got right to work. In this weather, we couldn’t use our assigned field at the University of Miami. It was outdoors. There was an indoor bubble at the Miami Dolphins’ practice facility in Fort Lauderdale, near the field the Colts were using. In case of rain, the NFL had decided, the two teams would rotate use of the bubble.
But there was no conflict on Monday afternoon. The Colts weren’t even in Florida yet. They were still traveling from Indianapolis. They weren’t arriving until six thirty p.m. We had no competition for the bubble. We had a great practice. The Colts arrived just as we were winding down.
The visuals were perfect. We got exactly the TV pictures Parcells had predicted we would, contrasting images from the Monday before the Super Bowl. Our players, pads on, sweating after a good, hard practice as the Colts were just showing up.
Bill and I had spent a lot of time talking in the two weeks before the Super Bowl. Who better? He’d been there—three times. He believed in leaving nothing to chance. I had asked him, “When we get to Miami, would you speak to the team?”
He was a little torn. He was an employee of the Miami Dolphins, team president. It would be different if he were retired, he said. He was reluctant to meet formally with the players on one team, especially when the Super Bowl was in Miami. Twenty years ago, a guy like that could speak to a team and nobody outside would even know it. Now, with Twitter, bloggers, agents, anything that takes place in this league is immediately known everywhere. Nothing—and I mean nothing—happens in secret on an NFL team.
“I’d like to speak to your team,” Bill told me. “I’m rooting for you. You know I’m rooting for you like a son. But I respectfully decline, and you have to understand why.”
“Listen,” I said. “There’s no need to say anything more. I understand. I also know how you feel. Just come watch us practice when we get there.”
“Great,” he said. “And I may have a message for you to deliver to them.”
Bill came with Tony Sparano, whom I’d been with for three years in Dallas and whom I probably was closest to on that Cowboys staff. Tony was Bill’s head coach in Miami now. They came to practice and just hung out. It was awesome having Bill there. He had a chance to watch us. He looked exactly like a proud dad.
Tuesday is always Media Day at the Super Bowl. No practice on Tuesday. So Monday night, a number of the players decided they would go out. They figured this was their chance to cut loose in Miami. I didn’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not naive. If I were a player, that’s the night I’d be going out. But I’d damn sure make the Tuesday morning bus.
The buses were scheduled to leave the Intercontinental at ten a.m. Arrival time at Sun Life Stadium was ten forty. And five of our players didn’t make the bus. There was some question, I guess, about whether I’d told them they could drive themselves. That really wasn’t what I had said. Whatever. When the rest of us arrived at the stadium, five guys weren’t there—Tracy Porter, Bobby McCray, Roman Harper, Usama Young and Jermon Bushrod. Fred McAfee, our player programs director, was on his cell phone, looking pained. The position coaches were also on their cell phones, trying to track their guys down.
This was the perfect time for a crisis, Bill Parcells-style. It was early in the week. What the players had done really wasn’t that big a deal. Monday was the night they were supposed to go drinking. Tuesday was just Media Day. It was all unimportant. Who cares what time Media Day activities are supposed to begin? Believe me, the media will wait. And one by one, the five missing players began to show up. This was going to be a teaching moment. Teaching by confrontation.
“Coach, the league’s ready,” one of the staff people announced.
“They’ll wait,” I said. “We’re not ready yet. We’re still one player short.”
By now, Greg Bensel, the PR guy, was getting pretty agitated. Greg Aiello and the other public relations people from the NFL were leaning on him. The reporters were waiting too. The Saints were late. We were still in the locker room. I don’t know if everyone knew it yet. But we were going to have a little emergency meeting just as soon as the last straggler arrived. It was Tracy Porter. Finally he appeared in the locker room.
All the doors were closed. I began to speak.
“You guys,” I said, starting softly. “You guys remind me of a team that’s just happy to be here.”
A few players glanced at one another. No one said anything.
I continued. “There’s a lot of things I don’t do well,” I said. “But I have very good intuition. It’s go
tten me to this point in my career. Part of that is developed. Part of it’s innate. But I can, and I do, pay attention. And I have a good sense of what is going on here.”
I stopped a moment to let that sink in.
“My intuition tells me you guys are in for a rude awakening this coming weekend. I can smell an ass-kickin’ on the way. I can smell a team that looks like they’re just happy to be in the Super Bowl. You guys reek of that team.”
I could hear my voice getting more intense as I was speaking. I wasn’t shouting, but I was personal and direct. I called out a few players by name. I said, “Hell, the secondary—three of the four DB’s—can’t make the bus on time. Do you honestly think Pierre Garçon and fuckin’ Dallas Clark and these other guys from the Colts are out to the wee hours? Late for Media Day? You’re late. You’re fuckin’ clueless. You got no idea.”
It wasn’t that I was yelling. I don’t believe I ever yelled. But mostly, I was just talking to them condescendingly. There was the smallest hint of disdain in my voice. We were now half an hour late for Media Day. Everyone was waiting. The doors were still closed.
I got on the coaches too. That happy-to-be-here attitude was contagious, I said. Too many people were congratulating one another already. We hadn’t done anything here to be proud of yet. I had noticed a certain giddiness on the bus rides and in the hotel lobby. “Let me know if you’re gonna party all week, because I’ll go drink red wine at the Prime too,” I said. “We’re not gonna get vested in a game plan if this is the way we’re gonna go. Ah, hell, I’ll go get fucked-up with the rest of you. Is that what we’re here for?”
I went on like that a little longer. I think they got my point.
“Before I finish talking,” I told them, “I have something else I want to add. I asked Bill Parcells to speak to you guys. You know he means a lot to me. He’s a smart guy, and you’ve heard me talk about him. He’s not in a position to speak to this team. He had a message that I was going to give you on Saturday, but I’m going to give it to you today.”
Bill’s message wasn’t something he dreamed up alone. It dates back decades before him. It sounds to me like pure Vince Lombardi, but it probably goes back even further than that. I told the players: “Here’s what Bill Parcells said. He said, ‘When the band stops playing and the crowd stops cheering—when people stop paying to come—and it’s quiet and all you’re left with is yourself, you’ve gotta be able to answer the question ‘Did I do my best? Did I do everything fuckin’ possible to win this game?’ ”
I let it hang there for a second.
“And that’s not all he said,” I continued. “He said, ‘I’ve won two Super Bowls, and I’ve lost one. There are moments in that loss that taught me more than all the great memories of the two wins.’ ”
That loss was January 26, 1997, Super Bowl XXXI. Parcells’s New England Patriots played the Green Bay Packers in the Louisiana Superdome. “Bill told me this. He said, ‘I had replaced one of the special teams players at L3 because of an injury. I had to put someone else in. And just when we had the momentum back in that game—we’d cut their lead to 27-21—Desmond Howard returned a kickoff ninety-nine yards for a touchdown and—wouldn’t you know it?—the guy I debated on whether I should be putting in at the L3 was the guy that couldn’t make the play. Now that fuckin’ haunts me forever, because we had just gotten momentum back.’”
All the successes he’d had, and Bill Parcells couldn’t forget the one Super Bowl he’d lost.
“Parcells told me, ‘So my message to you and your players is this: You’ll live with this for the rest of your life. And so when the band stops playing, when the people stop cheering, when the questions and reporters and all those other things subside, and you’re alone, quiet, and all you have are your thoughts—you’ve gotta be able to answer this question: ‘Did I do my best?’ ”
From the looks on the faces in the Sun Life Stadium locker room, what I had to say and Parcells had to say—all of it had been heard.
“I didn’t plan to give you this until Saturday,” I told the players. “But he wanted you to hear it. And you know what? It’s appropriate you hear it fuckin’ today.”
At this point, none of the players said anything. I’m not sure some of them were breathing.
When I finished, Drew Brees wanted to talk to the team, which seemed right to me. Drew said, “Hey, everyone else clear out. I want to talk to the players.” So they had their own minimizing. Only then did we do the Media Day interviews.
When we went to work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, everyone was very focused. No one was just happy to be there.
Rather than holding a phony meeting on Tuesday, the players gave me the perfect opportunity to create a crisis. They delivered it to me in a golden wrapper. The crisis was, We’re not ready, and the team we’re playing is doing everything in its power to be ready. It created a sense of urgency with the coaches and the players even before we began the workweek.
32
TOUGH GOING
THE COLTS WERE A five- or six-point favorite in Super Bowl XLIV, although that spread had jumped around a bit. Most of the media, even in New Orleans, considered us the underdogs. What could be better than that? Going into the Super Bowl when most people are convinced your opponent is stronger? That environment suits me. All the pressure is on the other team.
On paper, the teams didn’t look very far apart. We’d both had long undefeated runs in the regular season. We ended up 13-3. The Colts finished 14-2. Both teams had won their respective divisions. For the first time in sixteen years, both teams were number one seeds.
Our offense had led the NFL in scoring with just under thirty-two points a game. Our quarterback was the NFL’s top-rated, completing nearly 71 percent of his passes. But the Colts had some advantages too. Their season had ended a little more cheerily than ours had. They lost at the end only when they rested their starters. We’d lost a couple we’d really tried to win. Peyton Manning, their quarterback, had thrown for forty-five hundred yards and thirty-three touchdowns during the season, making him the NFL MVP for a record fourth time. And there was a difference in Super Bowl experience. This was their second Super Bowl appearance in four seasons, our first in forty-three years.
Sunday was a beautiful night at Sun Life Stadium in Miami. Sixty degrees, maybe just a bit cooler. No chance of rain. Very little wind. If you were sitting on our bench, the slight breeze was blowing from left to right. If someone had said, “Dial up the weather for the Super Bowl,” this is what you would have ordered. It was just perfect.
That could not be said about the way the game began for us. We won the toss and chose to receive. The Colts kicked off. This being an even-numbered year, the Colts, as the AFC representative, were the official home team, but that meant nothing, of course. Except for this: uniform colors. In the stands, I saw far more Saints jerseys than Colts jerseys. From the perspective of our bench, we were playing right to left, into whatever breeze there was.
We had spent a long time planning our first fifteen plays. We call them “our openers.” Some weeks we’d go through those plays, and we’d be rolling. We’d score on the first drive. We had been one of the most successful teams in the league on opening possessions. We were first or second in the NFL in first-drive scoring. We went through the first seven weeks of the season scoring on our first possession in every case—a touchdown or at least a field goal.
But this time, we went three and out. So much for openers. We ran Pierre Thomas. We threw a short pass to Pierre that brought up a third and two. We had talked the night before and all agreed: The very first third down we had, we would take a shot deep. We’d given this a lot of thought. Indianapolis was really a big zone team. They play a lot of soft-zone cover two or cover three. They’re a hard team to get the ball behind. They hadn’t given up many big plays all season. We knew we’d have to earn what we could underneath the coverage. They would force us to execute seven- or eight-play drives. They weren’t giving up a cheap or a lo
ng touchdown. They were very well coached, and that was their scheme. But on third down, like so many teams, they used a bit more man-to-man. We saw a little opportunity to take a shot.
So that first third down, Drew threw long. We got the man-to-man coverage we were looking for. But they played it well. Robert Meachem was outside to our right, Devery Henderson to our left and Marques Colston to the inside. Drew threw to Meachem, but the pass was incomplete. It was close. And, hey, we backed them up a bit. But that’s what happened. So we punted.
The Colts answered with a quick fifty-three-yard drive and a thirty-eight-yard Matt Stover field goal. Ugh. At forty-two years old, Stover became the oldest person ever to play in a Super Bowl. Colts up, 3-0.
Courtney Roby almost fumbled our kickoff return near the twenty-five, but he was ruled down by contact. Lucked out on that one. Brees passed to Reggie Bush for sixteen yards and a first down. But the drive didn’t go much farther, and we were forced to punt. Thomas Morstead’s kick left the Colts with tough field position at their own four-yard line.
No problem for Manning and the first-quarter Colts. Joseph Addai’s three rushes totaled fifty-three yards. Manning’s three completions included a nineteen-yarder to Pierre Garçon for a touchdown. The ninety-six-yard drive was a Super Bowl record.
First-quarter momentum? Solidly with the Colts.
When you start any game, obviously you say: “Gosh, we need to get off to a good start.” This wasn’t the start we wanted.
The Colts’ offense was on the field far longer than ours was. They were converting their third downs, and we weren’t converting ours. Jim Caldwell was coaching steady. Manning had been like a machine. We were down 10-0. But we had a game plan. And nowhere in our game plan were the words “Saints fold.”