Payton and Brees, стр. 3
And as great as Payton and Brees are, none of this would have happened if ownership and management had not empowered them. By relinquishing some of his authority, Saints general manager Mickey Loomis instilled confidence in Payton and Brees to become the faces of the franchise. Payton clearly defined the kind of players he wanted in his program—smart, tough, disciplined, high character—and Loomis and the personnel department went out and found them. In turn, Payton empowered Brees to lead the team—on and off the field. This sharing and transferring of power resonated throughout the team. Everyone bought in.
After a preseason in 2006 that generated zero wins, the team went to Cleveland for the season opener. The Browns scored a touchdown on a 74-yard pass on the first play from scrimmage. I don’t believe the winning culture had been entrenched in our team by that time, and I could see players thinking, Here we go again. The play was called back because of a holding penalty. We proceeded to win the game thanks to four field goals by John Carney. The next week we went to Green Bay and beat the Packers 34–27, avenging a 52–3 loss from the previous season. In Week 3, the NFL scheduled a Monday night game against our division rival, the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons were 2–0 and three-point favorites. But this was a homecoming for the team and the city after Hurricane Katrina, and the Falcons never had a chance. Final score: Saints 23–3.
The 3–0 start helped validate the front-office decision to hire Coach Payton as well as Payton’s choice to elevate Drew Brees as the team leader. We went on to finish 10–6, win the NFC South, and make the franchise’s first-ever appearance in the NFC Championship Game. The season had reestablished the team into the city of New Orleans and its culture. The team did not win the Super Bowl that year, and some fine-tuning would be needed before we reached that level, but this allowed the organization to silence some critics and instill the belief that this was an emerging first-class operation. Thanks to Drew and Coach Payton, a winning culture had been established. The days of eating at ramshackle chicken buffets were over for the New Orleans Saints.
Steve Gleason played most of his career with the New Orleans Saints. In 2019, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to ALS awareness.
Prologue
The Superdome was melting down.
Deshaun Watson and the Houston Texans had just stunned the New Orleans Saints with a go-ahead touchdown with 37 seconds left in their game on September 29, 2019. On consecutive plays, DeAndre Hopkins and Kenny Stills somehow got behind the Saints secondary for catches of 38 and 37 yards, respectively, the latter resulting in the touchdown.
Only seconds earlier, the Dome was celebrating kicker Wil Lutz’s 47-yard field goal with 50 seconds left. With the Texans out of timeouts and nearly out of time, the Saints looked assured of winning their first season opener in five years. Then everything came unraveled. In the span of 13 head-spinning seconds, the Saints’ 27–21 lead had flipped into a 28–27 deficit.
Saints fans, who had suffered through heart-breaking, last-second playoff losses to the Minnesota Vikings and Los Angeles Rams each of the previous two seasons, were beside themselves. That it was Stills, a former Saints draft pick, who caught the go-ahead score made the situation even more disgusting.
How could this happen?!
Not again!
Incredulous fans stirred and fidgeted as Drew Brees and the Saints offense took the field after the touchback on the ensuing kickoff. The Saints had 37 seconds and one timeout to work with. They needed to gain about 35 yards to reach Lutz’s range for a potential game-winning field goal attempt. The situation was bleak. The Saints’ win probability was 27 percent. But with Brees pulling the trigger, Saints fans had long ago learned that anything was possible.
Entering the 2019 season, Brees had orchestrated 36 fourth-quarter comebacks in his 19-year NFL career, more than any quarterback in NFL history except Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. And during his 14-year tenure with the Saints and head coach Sean Payton, he had become a master of the two-minute offense. During the final two minutes of games, his Total Quarterback Rating, a statistical metric used to measure a quarterback’s overall passing efficiency, was the best in the NFL from 2017 to 2019, according to ESPN.
To watch Payton and Brees operate in the two-minute drill is to watch true football genius at work. This is where all of their practice, preparation, and planning materialize and coalesce. They know these chaotic, pressure-packed seconds are often what separate great teams from good ones and Hall of Fame quarterbacks and coaches from average ones.
Given the inherent parity of the NFL, an inordinate number of games go down to the wire. During the first 14 weeks of the 2019 NFL season alone, 140 of 208 games (67.3 percent) were within one score during the fourth quarter, and 112 of those (53.8 percent) were decided by eight or fewer points.
For Brees, the intensity and pressure of the two-minute drill is the ultimate test of a quarterback. Over the course of his career, he has grown to embrace the challenge and thrive in the moment.
For Payton, the two-minute offense is the validation or condemnation of a head coach’s offseason preparation and weekly game plan. A former record-setting quarterback at Eastern Illinois, Payton has a unique understanding of the two-minute offense and its impact on winning and losing games. Payton sees the two-minute drill as the ultimate pop quiz for an offense. To prepare his team for the moment, he puts his players through countless two-minute scenarios during offseason practices. Every training camp practice ends with some form of two-minute drill between the offense and defense. The variables—score, timeouts available, time remaining, yards to go—always change to ratchet up the challenge of the situation.
One minute, three seconds to go, trailing by five points, two timeouts, ball on your own