Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  The country went into crisis management after 9/11. “For the Giants, it was so close to home,” Payton said. He took mental notes on how things were being done from an organizational standpoint. “In regards to how you present it to the team, you spend the proper time with the tragedy and then shift back to ‘We still have to prepare here,’ ” he said.

  The Saints’ front office remained in San Antonio immediately after the 2005 season, getting ready for the move back to their headquarters on Airline Drive down the road from Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Their two-story facility had been used as a staging area by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They had taken over the building. The locker room, the weight room, the training area, the coaches’ offices, and the executive offices were all used by FEMA. The Superdome was a shelter for residents whose homes had been destroyed. Payton’s first meeting with general manager Mickey Loomis was in San Antonio. He flew back to Dallas that evening while Texas was playing the University of Southern California in the 2005 national championship game at the Rose Bowl. It was just a quick get-to-know-you session with Loomis because Payton was flying in the morning to Green Bay to meet with Thompson. He spent the night prepping for his Green Bay interview. Payton returned to New Orleans the next week for his first visit after Katrina.

  “It was tough to go home and talk about it with my wife. We were concerned how we were going to make this work. We felt confident enough that ultimately we would find a place to live,” Payton said. “In fairness to Mickey and the organization, they did a good job of not trying to sugarcoat.”

  Loomis took him on a tour of the city. “It was awful,” Payton said.

  He accepted the job before his wife, Beth, even made a trip to New Orleans. “We just built a new home in Dallas, and we never moved in,” he said. “We lived in Dallas for three years, and after the second year we started to build a home a couple of blocks from the home we were living in. It literally just got completed a week before I was offered this job. We ended up selling both homes. That was tough.”

  The Paytons found a home in a very nice area across Lake Pontchartrain. It’s a long bridge across the water, and it took Payton forty-five minutes to get to work. After the 2010 season, the Paytons made the decision that Beth and the kids would live back in Dallas while Payton stayed in New Orleans. He had talked about that arrangement before accepting the job, but the Saints did not endorse it. Now that he had coached the Saints to the Super Bowl championship, he had a little more leverage. More than a year before the family moved back, Payton said of Dallas, “It was a place that we really enjoyed, and probably at some point in our future we will end up going back there.” Beth and the kids were in Dallas during the 2011 season while Sean was coaching the Saints. But the most dramatic change in Payton’s life came after the season. First, Goodell suspended him for the 2012 season. Then, in June, Payton filed for divorce from Beth. She filed a counterpetition. They had been married nearly twenty years. His job and his marriage were no longer there.

  But on this day Payton is sitting in the Saints cafeteria. It is December 2009. His team is 12–0 and will finish 13–3 and beat the Cardinals and the Vikings in the playoffs at the Superdome and then beat the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami. It would be years before he would be called to meet with the NFL’s security team.

  Payton thought it was a great idea to hire Williams after the 2008 season. Williams, the former Buffalo Bills head coach, was the first assistant hired by Joe Gibbs when he returned to the Redskins in 2004. Williams was considered the heir apparent whenever Gibbs decided to retire again. When Gibbs left after the 2007 season, Williams was interviewed four times by the Redskins. But he was not hired amid reports, which he strongly denied, that he was disrespectful to Gibbs during the interview process. Gibbs had wanted Williams so badly in 2004 that he flew to Buffalo on Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s private plane to recruit him. Snyder gave Williams a deal averaging $1.15 million per year, which was more than he was making in Buffalo. Tom Coughlin, just hired by the Giants, had also contacted Williams about joining his staff.

  When Gibbs left the Redskins after four seasons, Williams had one year remaining on his contract, but once the Redskins knew they were not hiring him, they released him from any obligation and allowed him to start looking for work. It sent up an immediate red flag when Snyder elected not to hire Williams, especially when he hired the unproven Jim Zorn instead. Williams went to Jacksonville on a one-year deal and was a coaching free agent again after the 2008 season.

  Payton had an opening after firing defensive coordinator Gary Gibbs, who had been with him on Parcells’s staff in Dallas. Williams had a reputation of putting together excellent defenses. His players always spoke highly of him. Payton knew that with Brees at quarterback, all he needed was a defense that would not force Brees to put up video game numbers and the Saints would be Super Bowl contenders.

  Payton had never met Williams before he interviewed him. “I had been on teams that played against his defenses,” Payton said. “Always at Washington, regardless of personnel, they played hard and were very respected. We knew there were some other places he was going to visit. It got to where, all right, we’re ready to make an offer.”

  The Packers, Texans, and Titans were also interested. Williams had been the defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans before the Bills hired him as their head coach in 2001; he got the job instead of John Fox, who had just been to the Super Bowl with the Giants. Williams lasted just three years in Buffalo and had a 17–31 record. Williams and Titans coach Jeff Fisher were best friends, and it seemed logical in 2008 that he would go back with Fisher. That was what he did right after the 2011 season when Fisher was hired in St. Louis, but the indefinite suspension he was handed by Goodell forced Fisher to make other plans.

  Payton had just signed a new five-year $28 million contract that paid him $5.6 million per year. The Saints were prepared to offer Williams a three-year deal at $1.25 million per season. Payton didn’t think Williams would accept, not with three other teams also interested. The going rate was $1.5 million per year for a veteran coordinator. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t going to lose this guy to another team because we were light $250,000,” Payton said.

  He called Loomis. It was a Friday night, and he felt Williams was close to making his decision. Payton really wanted Williams, a move that might have paid off in a Super Bowl championship but eventually did major damage to Payton’s career.

  “Hey, let’s get to a million five. I don’t want to lose this guy. There’s a number of coordinators making a million five. I’ll throw in $250,000 of my own money,” Payton said.

  “Let me talk to Mr. Benson. Call me back,” Loomis said.

  Benson gave the okay. Payton called Williams. It was their first conversation about money. “It’s going to be a million five per year for three years,” Payton said.

  The next morning, Payton called Loomis. He wanted to make sure his $250,000 contribution was just for one year. The Saints would be on the hook for the entire payment in the second and third years. Payton was not surprised that the Saints took him up on his offer. “It was all good,” he said. “I just signed a contract for about $5.5 million a year. I wanted Mickey and Mr. Benson to feel like, ‘I’m in with this hire. Let’s go.’ ”

  Payton never told Williams he was paying part of his salary. Around the Super Bowl that season, ESPN reported that the Saints had reimbursed Payton the $250,000 in week nine. Williams already was paying dividends. The Saints wound up number one in the NFL in point differential and number three in turnover differential. Tracy Porter clinched the Super Bowl when he intercepted Peyton Manning and returned it 74 yards for a touchdown with just over three minutes remaining.

  At the time, it seemed like the best $250,000 Payton would ever spend. But Williams wound up costing him more than twenty times as much in salary for 2012 that will never be reimbursed. Shortly after the 2011 season, Williams was gone, out of town befo
re the bounty scandal erupted. People close to Payton said that even before the Saints got in trouble with the league, he had no intention of asking Williams to return in 2012.

  The Saints’ 2011 season ended in the divisional round of the playoffs in San Francisco, a crushing 36–32 loss. New Orleans took leads with 4:02 and 2:37 remaining, but each time Williams’s defense gave up a touchdown, first on a 28-yard run by Alex Smith and then on Smith’s 14-yard touchdown pass to Vernon Davis with just nine seconds left in the game.

  Nearly three months after that game, a damaging audiotape surfaced of Williams meeting with the defensive players at their San Francisco airport hotel the night before the loss to the 49ers. The audio became public on the same day Payton was appealing his suspension to Goodell. It was bad timing for Payton, but Goodell knew about the tape before it went viral on the Internet. The recording was made public by filmmaker Sean Pamphilon, who was working on a documentary about former Saints special teams star Steve Gleason, who had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. The tape reveals Williams calling for his players to target Smith, running back Frank Gore, tight end Vernon Davis, and wide receivers Michael Crabtree and Kyle Williams.

  “We’ve got to do everything in the world to make sure we kill Frank Gore’s head. We want him running sideways. We want his head sideways,” Williams was heard saying. He then said, “We hit fucking Smith right there,” while pointing to his chin. “Remember me. I got the first one. I got the first one. Go lay the motherfucker out.” When he said “I got the first one,” Pamphilon said, Williams was rubbing his hands together like the sign for money. He encouraged his players to “affect the head. Continue, touch and hit the head,” coming off the pile. He said they needed to hit wide receiver Kyle Williams early—he’d had a concussion problem during the season. Then, talking about Crabtree, he said, “We need to decide whether Crabtree wants to be a fake-ass prima donna or he wants to be a tough guy. We need to find that out. He becomes human when we fucking take out that outside ACL [anterior cruciate ligament].”

  In the recording, Williams told the Saints, “Kill the head, the body will die.” He also said, “Respect comes from fear” and “We never apologize for the way we compete.”

  It was the last game Williams coached for the Saints. It was too late to apologize. The damage had been done. Payton wound up in the NFL office three times. He had his team taken away from him for the 2012 season. It was his fault. The coach is responsible. The lesson learned: it was the worst $250,000 he never spent.

  Payton’s career derailed when the bounty scandal was revealed. It was a condemnation of him as an administrator more than of his ability to coach the game of football. At the time of his suspension, he was in the upper echelon of NFL coaches along with Bill Belichick, Tom Coughlin, Mike Tomlin, and Mike McCarthy. He inherited a program in New Orleans that was about as low as it gets in the NFL. The city was in a shambles; it was not going to be a place that would attract free agents, and players with young families would be reluctant to relocate even though their inclination is always to follow the money.

  The Saints needed star power. They also needed a quarterback when Payton arrived in 2006. He immediately thought about trying to persuade Parcells to trade him Romo, who had yet to take over as the Cowboys starter. Payton was the point man when Romo signed with the Cowboys as a free agent in 2003 after he went undrafted following his career at Eastern Illinois, which is where Payton went to college. Payton was on the phone with Romo during the last two rounds and knew that if he didn’t get drafted, the Cowboys would face competition to sign him. As soon as the draft was over, Payton was back on the phone with Romo.

  “Hey, I know you’re disappointed. Do me one favor here. You got all these teams calling you. Just look at the depth chart of every one of these teams,” Payton told him.

  The Cowboys’ depth chart: Quincy Carter, Clint Stoerner, Chad Hutchinson. That was not an intimidating cast of characters. “If you can be smart enough here, be smart enough not to let the signing bonus get in the way, you’ll pick the right spot,” Payton said. “Now I know it’s the Dallas Cowboys and Bill Parcells, but you need to make this decision based on where you can make a team and compete.”

  Free agents in 2003 would get $2,500 to $5,000 as a signing bonus. The Cowboys offered Romo a bonus of $10,000. “High for a free agent,” Payton said.

  There were four or five other teams offering $10,000. The Cowboys increased their offer to $15,000. Parcells got on the phone with Romo. Jerry Jones got on the phone. Payton was working hard on Romo. Then Payton heard that one team, which he believed was Arizona, had jumped its offer to $25,000.

  “Tell him, shit, we’ll match it,” Jones said.

  “Honestly, Mr. Jones, I think we’re going to get him at 15. I think he wants to come. He’s smart enough to know this is a good opportunity,” Payton said.

  Ten minutes later, Romo called back and accepted the Cowboys’ offer. Payton had been in Dallas only a couple of months, but he had made a friend in Jones, who loves money. “To this day, Jerry says ‘I didn’t know you very well, but you saved me $10,000,’ ” Payton said.

  It made sense that after working in practice with Romo for three seasons, Payton would be interested in bringing him to New Orleans. Aaron Brooks started thirteen games and Todd Bouman started three games for the Saints in 2005. They needed a quarterback. “Dallas wasn’t going to part ways with Tony,” Payton said. “We made inquiries.”

  Parcells liked what he saw in Romo. He had signed Drew Bledsoe, his former Patriots quarterback, in Payton’s last year in Dallas but invested enough time in Romo over three seasons and decided not to give up on him. Early in Romo’s fourth season, Parcells benched Bledsoe and promoted Romo to the starting job.

  Payton needed to find an alternative. The Saints had the second pick in the draft and would have their choice of quarterbacks Vince Young, Matt Leinart, and Jay Cutler. Payton could pick any of the three and try to develop him into a winning quarterback. But there was an intriguing free agent. Drew Brees had put together two consecutive fabulous seasons with the Chargers—he threw for a total of fifty-one touchdowns and just twenty-two interceptions and was selected to play in the Pro Bowl each year—but in the final game of 2005, he tore the labrum in his right shoulder and suffered a partial tear of his rotator cuff. His shoulder was dislocated. He had been hit in the end zone by Denver safety John Lynch. The ball came loose, and Brees went after it. Broncos defensive tackle Gerard Warren landed on Brees.

  “Obviously, I’d like to get this thing operated on as soon as possible,” Brees said after the game. “We’re all very optimistic. The doctors are very optimistic, saying that this is something that they’ve seen before, done before. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

  It gave the Chargers the perfect opportunity to part with Brees. They had drafted Eli Manning first overall in 2004 and within the hour had traded him to the Giants for Philip Rivers. Manning didn’t want to play in San Diego, and the Chargers were not going to risk having him sit out the season and go back in the draft the next year. They drafted Manning knowing the Giants wanted him. The Giants selected Rivers for the Chargers and then consummated the deal with the Chargers. San Diego coach Marty Schottenheimer had coached Rivers in the Senior Bowl, and the Chargers loved him.

  Rivers’s holdout as a rookie lasted deep into training camp, which prevented him from competing for the starting job and precluded San Diego from trading Brees. He responded by throwing twenty-seven touchdowns and only seven interceptions, and Rivers couldn’t get off the bench. In his first three seasons, Brees had twenty-nine touchdowns and thirty-one interceptions, which is why San Diego wanted Rivers. Brees won eleven of his fifteen starts in 2004 and kept the starting quarterback job. San Diego used its franchise tag on Brees in 2005, and he signed a one-year $8 million contract. Rivers attempted only thirty passes in his first two seasons.

  But Brees’s shoulder injury changed everything. Chargers general manager A. J. Smith w
asn’t going to franchise Brees again, not when he had suffered a major injury and not when he wanted to get Rivers on the field anyway. San Diego wished Brees well, and he became a free agent. He went to Birmingham, Alabama, where famed orthopedist Dr. James Andrews rebuilt his damaged throwing shoulder.

  Brees was the perfect quarterback for Payton—if he was healthy. If Payton had Brees’s talent, it’s how he would have played the game. The Saints and the Dolphins were the only teams interested. Payton flew to Birmingham in Benson’s plane and picked up Brees and his wife, Brittany, and brought them to New Orleans. “We had a well-planned day,” Payton said. “We wanted to make sure he saw the challenges we had.”

  Payton had never met Brees. “I knew of him and scouted him, and his work habits were unbelievable,” he said.

  Just a couple of months earlier, Payton hired Pete Carmichael Jr. off the Chargers staff to be his quarterback coach. He had been the quality control coach in San Diego. He later became the Saints’ offensive coordinator. Payton was just putting together his offensive playbook and was going to be flexible with the terminology. They had a Powerpoint presentation prepared for Brees on his visit. Once Brees signed, they gave him input on how he wanted certain plays labeled. “If I called a play Sail and Drew called it Flutie, then we will change it to Flutie,” Payton said. “We’re all going to learn it for the first time; the protection system and the run game were set up. But where we could take plays he was familiar with in San Diego and use that same terminology, it just made sense.”

  Payton and Brees spent three hours on football to make sure he understood that Payton had a plan and that it could work if Brees was the quarterback. Payton helped the Giants get to a Super Bowl with Kerry Collins, and in his first year in Dallas, he squeezed a playoff year out of Carter. After working on selling himself as the right coach, Payton had to persuade Brees and his wife that New Orleans was going to be the right place to raise a family. Payton drove the Breeses to the North Shore, about forty-five minutes from the Saints’ complex. They looked around some subdivisions, and then it was Payton’s intention to drive them to their hotel before having dinner at 7 p.m. The problem was that Payton was not yet familiar with the area and got lost on the way back. He made it to the twenty-one-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain without a problem. “It’s just a long, long flat bridge,” Payton said. “So we came across the causeway heading to the facility, and I got off on the wrong road. I knew better. I should have had somebody with me that knew the area. So we’re driving, we’re driving. It wasn’t twenty minutes out of the way. Now we’re about fifty minutes. And I’m looking in the rearview mirror, and poor Brittany is dosing off. I’m on the cell phone with Mickey, and he’s trying to get me back. So instead of being back by three, it’s four thirty.”