Payton and Brees, стр. 22
“And I think also, too, that Sean and the offense benefit from having a quarterback that’s always going to make things right. That’s why I would call it the Sean Payton offense with Drew Brees. That’s what it has become.”
8. The Winchester Mystery House
Late in the 2018 season, Drew Brees wanted to have a little fun. So he asked the offensive coaching staff to dig up a call sheet from Payton’s first season. They were stunned at how much had changed in 13 seasons.
The 2006 play calls were simple, many with just three to five words as opposed to the lengthy, almost comical 10- and 12-word calls Brees uses today. And the call sheet itself looked rudimentary, nothing like the massive document Payton has employed in recent seasons.
“Everything was so basic,” Brees said.
Lombardi joked that the Saints “couldn’t score a point” with the 2006 offense in today’s NFL.
The Saints offense today, Brees said, is “light years” from where it was when he and Payton started. He compared the 2006 offense to elementary school. The offense they run now, he said, “is like freakin’ Calculus 303.” Lombardi took it even further: “We’re at PhD level with this quarterback.”
How did it get here? Many factors played a role in the evolutionary process, but the rare continuity the Saints have enjoyed during the Payton-Brees era is the main reason they have advanced their offense from freshman orientation to graduate level sophistication. The Saints have had the same quarterback with the same head coach and the offensive coordinator in the same offensive system for 15 consecutive years. And in Carmichael, Lombardi, and receivers coach Curtis Johnson, they have three longtime assistants who know every detail of the system and how it’s supposed to work. It’s a unique situation. Even Tom Brady, who quarterbacked the New England Patriots for 20 years, went through three different offensive coordinators during his tenure.
In addition to the collective experience and familiarity, the group shares a high level of football IQ, an almost nerdy passion for Xs-and-Os play design. The continuity and expertise afford the Saints a level of experience and knowledge unmatched by any other offensive staff in the NFL.
“It’s never gotten stale between Sean and Drew and the other coaches on staff,” Lombardi said. “There’s always this drive. ‘Hey, we can’t just keep doing what we’ve done. How do we improve and evolve?’ And so, there’s been this consistency combined with the creativity.”
The evolution of the offense is partly born from necessity, the natural order of competitive sports taking its course. As defenses have evolved across the NFL, the Saints have needed to adapt their scheme to try to stay ahead of the competition.
“There’s a lot of research that goes into it,” Lombardi said. “We spend a lot of time in the offseason studying other teams, looking at our offense and seeing how defenses have evolved to play us. We’ve run this play and it’s been so successful for us, teams are starting to see this formation and checking to certain defenses to counter-punch. So we then say, ‘Okay, they are going to play this play like that, what’s another play that we can use to attack the defense?’ It’s a constant process.”
This creative mindset has kept the Saints offense ahead of opposing defenses and allowed the team to rank among the top 10 in yards gained for all 14 seasons of the Payton-Brees era. It’s also prevented it from going stale the way it did on Mike Martz in St. Louis and Mike McCarthy in Green Bay.
“They always want to improve, they always want to look to see how they can get better,” Marrone said. “They always want to grow, so it’s never, hey, this is what we do, and we’re going to do it. It’s, hey, this is what we can do and how can we get better? The mindset is always progressing, of wanting more, give me more so I can be more productive. There’s really no limit to where we want to go.”
And where the Saints offense has gone over the course of 14 seasons is to the extreme edge of offensive football. Today, the Saints run one of the most complicated and sophisticated offenses in the NFL. The play calls are among the longest in the NFL, some containing as many as 17 words. The playbook binder is now four-to-five inches thick. And the call sheet Payton takes into a given game looks like a Cheesecake Factory menu with literally hundreds of plays.
“We started with our offense, and it’s just grown and grown,” Carmichael said. “There’s been tweaks and some stuff eliminated and added, but the majority of the stuff we were doing in ‘06 still exists but it’s just gotten bigger because you’re spending time in the offseason seeing what other teams are doing. Oh, man, what a great idea. That fits our personnel. Let’s work on it in the offseason and see how we like it.”
McCown estimated that Brees and Payton probably add 30 to 35 plays to the playbook throughout a given season. But most alterations involve subtle changes to the core concepts within the Saints’ established menu. New plays have to fit within the scheme of the offense for players to digest and understand them easily.
“A lot of times you have video looks where you can show them, ‘See, take a peek at this,’” Payton said. “And you show them a picture: ‘Picture if we do [that].’ And so we try not to come up with a lot of new inventions. Might be formation, might be personnel grouping, but I think there’s a balance there of things that they know well.”
More new plays are sometimes added when new players are signed to the roster. For example, the Saints incorporated a read-option run package in the offense when Taysom Hill came on board in 2017. When Mark Ingram was