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

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  We parked our cars and headed up to Mickey’s office. We had our speakerphone call with Ornstein, our New York friend. A few minutes later, Mr. Benson came in. With the owner were his granddaughter, Rita Benson LeBlanc, and his grandson, Ryan LeBlanc. They were eager to analyze all the possibilities. There was some discussion of whether we should trade away the Reggie pick.

  I remember saying very calmly, “If we don’t select this guy as the second pick of the draft, it’ll be the worst thing we’ve ever done as an organization.” By the end of the night, everyone was on board.

  We had a huge tailgate party the next day in an open field near the facility on Airline Drive. Draft Day Fan Fest was sponsored by WWL Radio, the flagship station broadcasting Saints games, and the public was invited to come. There was a live band and free food. These were the hard-core Saints fans, a widely diverse mix of black and white, young and old, rich and poor and in between, a great cross-section of the region. In some cities the core NFL fan is a corporate suit with a hefty expense account. In New Orleans it’s some of them and a whole lot of families who come out for the beer and the food.

  “We’re getting Reggie,” they kept telling each other excitedly.

  “Can you believe it? We’re getting Reggie.”

  I’d met many Saints fans since I’d come to New Orleans, but mostly in ones and small groups. They were everything I’d been told they’d be, even in these post-Katrina days. Warm. Friendly. Completely without pretense. Utterly loyal to their team. They certainly hadn’t gotten much encouragement over the years, not in the form of victories anyway. But this was my first experience seeing them in a larger number. What energy and enthusiasm they had! These were the people, year after year, who’d chosen to believe when Saints officials said: “Wait till next year”—and then after another disappointing season, chose to believe again: “Wait till next year.”

  This was the “Who Dat Nation” I’d been hearing about.

  “Who dat?” they chanted.

  “Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? Who dat?”

  Were we finally going to give them something to cheer about?

  Their exuberance, their patience and their love for one another were impossible not to feel. You could not meet these people—stand around and talk with them—without marveling for at least a moment how full of life they were, even this soon after Katrina.

  “We pulled a fast one on the Texans,” one man told me, quite conspiratorially.

  When I protested that the Texans were skipping Reggie all on their own, he smiled at me and winked. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be our little secret.”

  These are the kinds of people I like to conspire with! Finally, they were getting a Saints draft worth their excitement.

  Between the first and second picks, the Jets did call. But the offer they were dangling wasn’t remotely enough. Within a minute of his saying “No, thank you” to the Jets, our selection was made. And when word reached Fan Fest, the band stopped playing and people began to cheer.

  Whether he wanted to or not, Reggie was coming to New Orleans!

  Acting on his own, Drew called Reggie that afternoon. Coming from San Diego, Reggie knew exactly who Drew was, and this call was critical. It was classic Drew Brees. He was a real team leader before he’d ever put on a Saints uniform. The call helped ease Reggie’s disappointment about New Orleans.

  The PGA Tour happened to be in town that same weekend. It was one of the first big events that had come to New Orleans after the storm. So the city was crowded for a change. Reggie and his agents flew in on a private jet. We were taking them to dinner back at Emeril’s. I know it sounds like we went to Emeril’s a lot. But you have to understand it was one of the only restaurants at that time we knew would be crowded. Lots of places weren’t open yet. Because of the golf weekend, the restaurant was especially packed.

  On the limo ride from Airline Drive to the restaurant, I remember thinking to myself: This was the antithesis of what Parcells would do with a first-round pick. “Never fly your first-round pick in early,” he once said. “Never drive him around in a limo. And never, ever put him in the presidential suite at the five-star Loews.”

  We walked into the restaurant—Mickey, Reggie, the two agents and me. The crowd recognized Reggie immediately. All of a sudden, people in the restaurant were chanting: “Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!”

  It was an amazing moment. It reminded me of the Muhammad Ali chants in the week leading up to the Joe Frazier fight. I was really quite moved. So was Reggie. Even Mike Ornstein had a beaming look on his face. Nobody was saying “Fuck you” anymore. The scene in the restaurant was so perfect, it almost seemed planned.

  Shortly after we were seated, a woman came over and handed her daughter’s cell phone number to Reggie’s agent. “Would you give this to him?” she asked.

  “You set this up?” Reggie asked me.

  I had to tell him: “Really? You think the last twenty-four hours were spent staging your arrival? We had a draft to worry about.”

  And I wanted to make something clear: “This is the last limo ride,” I told him. “The last fancy dinner, the last presidential suite. Save your shampoo from the Loews. We have to play some football. You’re at the Airport Hilton next week.”

  Mike Ornstein loved hearing that. This was his language. He understood the rude awakening that awaited college stars as they entered the NFL. He’d seen it before.

  And Reggie’s arrival turned out to be a real shot in the arm for the whole franchise, whatever hesitation there might have been at first. Brees was here. Now Reggie too. It brought excitement. It would soon bring ticket sales. There would be tangible, financial benefits. The city was a third smaller than it had been before the storm, and for the first time in Saints history, season tickets would sell out.

  That was saying something at a time like this.

  I could see the growing excitement over Drew and Reggie—and feel it—everywhere I went. People saying, “Thank you.” People saying, “It’s looking good.” People saying, “I know we’ve said this before, Coach, but this could be the year.”

  One night, Beth and I were at a concert at the New Orleans Arena. We were waiting in the beer line when a gentleman came up to me and said, “I’m not back at work yet. But I just went and got four season tickets—two for my brother and his wife, two for my wife and me. I’m out of a job, but I’m not worried. We can’t wait to see your team play.”

  Now, what would make someone who wasn’t working spend a couple of thousand dollars for a package of football tickets? It had to be more than a love for football. It was a sense that the team was coming back. There was real momentum. And this was the most important part: Supporting this team was a way of supporting this city. That’s how intertwined they were.

  I felt so grateful to that man and to thousands of others like him. This was early in the suffering for so many people. They were deep in recovery. Huge sacrifices were taking place. You knew the money for these season tickets didn’t come easily. You can’t take that lightly when you look at how someone chooses to spend entertainment dollars.

  There are not many teams in any sport that can point to such a spike in support. And it came at an impossible time for the region.

  It started with Drew Brees and Reggie Bush.

  In the time since then, Mike Ornstein and I have become good friends. He has represented me in some of my business dealings. I’ve come to understand that he is not someone easily offended by casual language. Actually, those words are like “Good morning” to Mike. Just a regular conversation. No big deal. He told me later that he had passed along my speakerphone message to Reggie, softening it only a bit.

  “These guys are gonna draft you,” he told his client. “Get over it.”

  To his credit, despite whatever misgivings he might have had about New Orleans, Reggie was gracious from the start. I tried to be mindful, of course, about what had gone on, what was said in New York. Reggie was just twenty-one
. He was a junior coming out of college. Those players at the top of the draft—they’re pulled in so many directions. I’m sure he felt disappointment at the uncertainty of New Orleans and playing for a first-year coach. Same as I felt disappointment about not going to Green Bay and Drew felt disappointment about missing the Miami sun.

  All of us had reservations, and all of us were here.

  There was some lingering concern about how Reggie and Deuce McAllister would complement each other, concern on both their parts, I think. I sat down with Deuce and told him Reggie’s arrival wasn’t going to impact his role negatively. I said, “Let me as the head coach figure out how to use you guys in a plan. Trust me. There will be plenty of snaps for both of you, plenty of offense for both backs—both uniquely different.”

  Both the new guys, Reggie and Drew, immediately embedded themselves in the community. Even before they came to practice, they made themselves impossible not to like. They helped raise money for rebuilding groups. They turned up at media events. Both set up their own charitable foundations. And the team was gaining momentum too.

  That first draft was very successful for us. It produced Roman Harper, Marques Colston, Jahri Evans—several key starters on our Super Bowl team.

  More important, it showed me that my early intuition about our general manager, Mickey Loomis, was turning out to be right. He was exactly who I’d thought he was when I first interviewed with him. He was calm and organized and a good decision maker. He had none of the ego that is so prevalent in our league. He had a unique way of moving all parties to a good decision without grabbing credit. He was the quiet man in the corner who is somehow behind every good idea. He was just as excited as I was about Reggie and Drew.

  In the next four years, this Payton-Loomis relationship was going to flourish.

  12

  GETTING READY

  THE NFL HAS STRICT rules about how and when a team can practice in the off-season. There are calendars and dates, and even some special exceptions for a team that has a new head coach. From the moment we went to work in New Orleans, our attitude was “We have so much to do here. Let’s get started now.” We knew we’d be making extraordinary demands on the players. We knew—and they discovered quickly—that they had never worked so hard in their lives. We all knew that crafting this team into winners would be very, very difficult. We were talking about turning around an organization that for decades seemed to have tried not to win.

  The people of New Orleans deserved a great home team, and we were going to give it to them. You can’t do that by just hoping for change.

  We had to live within the rules of the NFL. We weren’t going to ignore them. But we were committed to reviving a football team and doing what we could to revive a decimated city—even if it meant exhausting ourselves. Some of the players from that 2006 season would tell you that there were days and weeks they thought there had to be some kind of rule that prohibited pushing people so hard.

  Conceptually, what we were doing wasn’t so complicated. To find a place on this roster, a player had to show three things: character, toughness and intelligence. Character. Toughness. Intelligence. Simply stated, these were our core beliefs.

  Bill Belichick had instilled something similar in New England. Bill Parcells did it in Dallas and the other places he’d been. In those organizations as in ours, there was clear recognition that football isn’t just a game for mindless jocks. We wanted talented players, of course—people who had the technical skills to run, catch, throw and scramble. But the best players, the right players, are always the ones who can enrich their technique with real inner fortitude, genuine personal qualities that turn talent into greatness.

  Character, toughness, intelligence. We told our scouts explicitly: Be on the lookout for players who have all three.

  We wanted players we didn’t have to worry about when they left the building. There are lots of temptations in New Orleans, even after a devastating hurricane. We didn’t want players who would be in the French Quarter every night till five a.m. We wanted players with the character to know right from wrong and to conduct their lives by that knowledge. Players like that will mold a team, set high standards and give the others good reason to achieve.

  The same is true with intelligence. We put up a sign in the locker room. “Smart Players Seldom Do Dumb Things.” This doesn’t mean just school smarts. Football intelligence is something more than that—part instinct, part intuition, a big part paying attention. It really comes down to judgment under pressure. How good are the decisions that you make?

  And players must be tough. Whatever their talents, however good their team, a time will come when they are challenged. To overcome an injury. To persevere through defeat. To sacrifice personal glory for a higher cause. We wanted players with the toughness to make that choice and live with it.

  It didn’t matter if a player had been with the team before we got here, or if he was a highly anticipated draft choice, or if he had walked in for a tryout off the street. How the players arrived at Airline Drive was unimportant to us. What they did once they got here would determine how bright their future was. Oh, and anyone who wanted to leave was more than welcome to do so.

  For locker room credibility, the starkness of that was huge.

  The off-season program began in March with running and weight lifting. That led up to the bonus minicamp in April, which the league allowed all new coaching staffs to hold. Next was the official minicamp at the beginning of June. At each of these turns, we pushed the players extremely hard.

  The veterans got their first taste of the new Saints tempo at the April minicamp. We purposely scheduled this before the draft, in order to gain more insight into the roster we’d inherited. The moment the opening horn blasted, the players immediately knew they had never attended a minicamp quite like this, nothing as fast and demanding.

  In near-unison, a dozen coaches began to shout orders. But Joe Vitt’s South Jersey sandpaper was somehow the loudest of all.

  “Get your ass over here,” he was yelling. “This isn’t a country club. We’re not gonna get our asses kicked like we have in the past. Not gonna happen. Not as long as I’m here.”

  This was not gentle persuasion. This was the earsplitting definition of in-your-face.

  Curtis Johnson, our wide receivers coach, was competing with Vitt for oxygen. From Joe Horn on down, all of the players seemed to understand that things were different now.

  We didn’t give anyone any time for bad body language or stray opinions. It was law and order around here. No Lay-Z-Boys and no lazy boys. The evaluation process had begun.

  In early June, the rookies arrived on Airline Drive. We kept going, and we were going hard. The rookies knew immediately they were behind where the veterans were.

  By and large, most of the team seemed to grasp the new expectations. There were some exceptions. Donté Stallworth, the Saints’ first-round draft pick in 2002 and thirteenth overall that year, showed up late for mandatory team meetings more than once. I had a word with Donté after the second time. “I’m dying to trade or cut you,” I told him. “You’re making it easy for me.”

  Donté had been a player who’d flashed signs of greatness—superior speed and some big play-making ability. But his career to that point had been plagued by inconsistency and injuries. And he wasn’t doing much to reverse the impression that he was a slacker. In this new Saints offense, someone who was unreliable would have a hard time fitting in.

  Defensive tackle Jonathan Sullivan was another player who showed up on the radar—and not in a good way. He too was a first-round pick, sixth overall, the Saints had traded up for in 2003. That meant we had given up two first-round picks to draft this player. He was overweight now and didn’t seem eager to expend much extra effort. There was an unfortunate echo here. Earlier in his career, he’d been caught bellying up to the buffet in the pressroom, scooping up hot dogs on a game day. The media had had a blast with that. He too had flashed some signs of promise—and w
ay too many signs of falling short.

  Both players were soon on other rosters.

  Drew Brees was another story entirely. He got to work immediately, showing himself to be precisely the kind of leader we thought we’d found. With his slowly healing shoulder, he wouldn’t be able to throw a football until the end of July. But in mid-April, when the first minicamp started, he refused to stand on the sidelines and just watch. He called the plays in the huddle. He went to the line of scrimmage. He established the cadence. He didn’t take the snaps: The other quarterbacks got the reps and threw the balls. But Drew was a key presence in practice from the very start. He was already beginning to develop a rapport with the team. He just didn’t throw at first.

  His shoulder was only starting to mend. But his leadership was never impaired. In the huddle, in the locker room, in the weight room, in the meetings—he understood exactly what we were trying to do. He got it. He was still new to the program, but he was already one of the main leaders of the team. And this was a locker room full of people trying to find themselves. There were veterans from the old regime. There were new players who’d just shown up. People were just getting to know one another. There was a lot going on here. But Drew was always highly regimented, and he pushed himself and the others around him extraordinarily hard. He had a routine. He stuck with it. It set a powerful example.

  When practice was over for the day, he would remain on the field with several other players and go back through the practice from start to finish, going over whatever repetitions he’d missed. He did everything at a full-speed tempo except throw.

  All the while, we were assessing everyone: people on our team as well as all the players on the other thirty-one teams. Every team in the league has a pro-scouting department. We took the grades and reports from ours very seriously. Who was still out there that we could maybe grab now? How did they compare to the guys we had in the building? Do they have qualities that might be the right addition for the Saints? We often talked to our players about this process. It was important for everyone to understand: “Don’t just look closely at our own depth chart. You’re not competing with just the players who are already here. The final fifty-three-man roster could well include players who are now on other teams. What you put on tape is your résumé.”