Payton and Brees, стр. 37
But to get Harris one-on-one, they would need to address Minnesota’s safeties. Harrison Smith and Anthony Harris were both excellent in coverage. Smith was a perennial Pro Bowler, and Harris was enjoying a career year with an NFL-best six interceptions.
To address the safety issue, Payton designed the play with Hill at quarterback instead of Brees. There was a method to Payton’s madness. The threat of Hill as a runner forced teams to defend the Saints with an extra man in the box, usually a safety. This tactic would leave the defense with a single safety in center field. By aligning Harris on the same side of the field as star receiver Mike Thomas and running Thomas across the field on a corner route, Payton’s play design would put that safety in a quandary. He would have to choose between shadowing Thomas, the NFL’s leading receiver, or Harris, an unknown receiving commodity matched up with the Vikings’ Pro Bowl corner. Payton knew the answer. He also knew he would need to wait for the right time and situation to call the play—and he found it early in the second quarter as the Saints approached midfield.
Payton set up the play by calling for a Hill run on first down. His 11-yard gain had the Vikings on high alert. The trap was set. To enhance the ruse of a run option, backup offensive lineman Nick Eason was inserted into the lineup. The “heavy” personnel formation served the dual purpose of adding to the trickery while providing extra protection for Hill against the Vikings’ formidable pass rush. As Hill aligned in the shotgun, nine Vikings defenders were within five yards of the line of scrimmage, including Smith.
Hill’s play-action fake handoff to Kamara helped sell the run even further and lured the defense closer to the line of scrimmage. Hill then dropped back, looked at Thomas as he crossed the field on his corner route, and fired a bomb to Harris, who was streaking wide open down the middle of the field after beating Rhodes with a double move. Harris hauled in the bomb for a 50-yard gain. The Saints scored on the next to play to take a 10–3 lead.
“It took us a couple of reps in practice to get it down, but it worked almost perfectly,” Payton said.
It played out almost exactly the way Payton described it to Harris and Hill during the team’s installation of the play the previous Friday. Payton went into great detail, even identifying where Harris would eventually catch the ball.
“I told Deonte, you need to lean on Rhodes, exit door him and blow by him,” Payton said. “I envision this ball traveling in the air a long ways, so keep running. Your path is going right between the uprights. Taysom had to move off his spot so he underthrew it or it would have been a touchdown.”
The play was classic Payton. The biggest play in the game wasn’t Brees to Thomas. Instead, it was made by a third-string quarterback and a reserve first-year receiver, a pair of former undrafted free agents. And Payton called it in the playoffs against one of the best defenses in the NFL.
“What I like is Sean calls plays without a great deal of fear,” FOX Sports NFL analyst Troy Aikman said. “I think there’s a time when you have to be careful and all that, but for the most part he calls plays expecting his players to make plays. And they have a lot of weapons they can go to.”
Payton’s imaginative play-calling has been a staple of the Saints offense since he took the reins in 2006. He ceded play-calling duties to Carmichael in 2016 and 2011 after he injured his knee in a freak sideline incident. Otherwise, Payton has been the play-caller for the entire Brees run. While an army of young offensive-minded head coaches have entered the league in recent years, Payton, along with Andy Reid and Matt McCarthy, remains one of the longest- tenured and most respected head-coach play-callers in the business.
“I think [Payton] is certainly one of the best play-callers in the league, and he plays wide open,” said Steve Mariucci, the former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who called plays throughout his coaching career and now serves as an NFL analyst for NFL Network. “I like that about him. Sometimes a head coach might play it a little closer to the vest, because he has to be more broad-minded, worrying about resting the defense or things like that. But Sean just keeps it wide open all the time, and I really like that.”
Like many teams, Payton scripts the first 15 plays as a way to feel out the defense. At times, he uses the early game plan to set a tone for his offensive unit by establishing the run or attacking a certain defender in coverage. The plan almost always includes a litany of formations and personnel groupings so Payton and the staff can gather information for future use.
“You want to have tempo in the first 15, and you want to be able to see what their adjustments are to certain formations and certain personnel groupings,” Payton said. “You want to see how they’re going to defense Alvin Kamara, and how they’re going to play certain guys. There’s a lot of information gained. All those things I think you look closely at in your early plays.”
This strategy is one of the reasons why the Saints have traditionally been slow starters offensively. During the Payton-Brees era, they have scored an average of 8.6 points in the second quarter of games compared to 5.6 points in the first quarter, when they are executing their feeling-out process.
Strief said he could only remember a handful of times an