Payton and Brees, стр. 63
Another year it was a motivational cartoon depicting two men in dress shirts and ties carrying pickaxes in separate tunnels. The one on the bottom was slouched over with a glum expression on his face, holding his pickax over his right shoulder, and walking away from a thin barrier of mud separating him from a trove of diamonds. The man at the top was wielding his pickax over his head and digging frantically toward the diamonds, which he’d reach as long as he kept moving in that direction. The message: don’t give up.
“It’s one of Sean’s great strengths,” Brees said. “How do you find a way—and it’s one of the biggest challenges in the NFL—to make sure your team is ready to play 16 weeks? It’s a long season. It’s a marathon. How do you make it to where your team is always concentrated and never having a mental lapse? And you have to continue to find a chip to put on your shoulder, a motivational tactic of some kind that will get guys to play each week.”
Payton will also push individual players’ buttons if he feels they need a motivational kick. One year he gigged Jon Stinchcomb about his pre-snap penalties. He would regularly prod Jammal Brown and Larry Warford about their weight. Scott Shanle recalled Payton getting on him about his ability—or lack thereof—to cover the tight end.
“He’s always finding ways to give us an edge,” Shanle said.
The motivational ploys are one of Payton’s ways to “tend the garden.” He knows it’s human nature for players to let up or look ahead during a long season. So he relentlessly lives in the precious present. He works the locker room, the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, giving everybody something to think about.
“If it were every week it might come across as gimmicky,” Stinchcomb said. “But he knows when to pick his spots.”
In recent years, Payton has employed various visual aids to liven up team meetings. He would recruit mascots from Saints players’ respective colleges to make appearances at the meeting. Alabama’s Big Al elephant mascot (Mark Ingram), LSU’s Mike the Tiger (Will Clapp, Travin Dural), and Michigan State’s Sparty (a gig at Brees after Michigan State beat Purdue) were all flown to New Orleans and put up in hotel rooms.
When Georgia State upset Tennessee 38–30 in Week 1 of the 2019 season, Payton had the school’s Panther mascot outfit flown to New Orleans, and assistant equipment manager Blake Romig donned the outfit and handled the appearance duties.
“Sean always has something up his sleeve to get you excited and motivated and focused and locked in,” Ingram said.
The travel and hotel expenses for flying a mascot and his assistant to New Orleans and putting them up for a night at a local hotel would often cost thousands of dollars. What’s more, it required staff members to arrange the trips and escort the visitors to and from the airport, etc.—all for a five-minute appearance at the team meeting.
“It helps lighten the mood for the team during the season,” kicker Wil Lutz said. “It also shows shows how committed the team is to winning, that they would make that kind of investment for something like that.”
After the Saints defeated the Seattle Seahawks in Week 3 of the 2019 season, Payton had another surprise up his sleeve. After presenting the game balls to Teddy Bridgewater and other recipients, he cut the lights in the squad room and the video staff played a 40-second historical video of Pike Place Market in Seattle. When the video ended, Romig wheeled in a cart with a cooler filled with four large gutted salmon and a dozen of bags of salmon filets on the bottom. Payton then began calling out players by name and tossing the slimy fish across the squad room. Anyone with even the remotest ties to the Pacific Northwest got a fish: Taysom Hill, a Pocatello, Idaho, native; Loomis, an Oregon native; reserve quarterback J.T. Barrett, who spent time on the Seahawks practice squad for two weeks earlier in the season. As Payton hurled the slimy fish around the room, mayhem ensued as players and coaches scurried out of the line of fire.
“That was crazy,” said Joe Lombardi, who was born and raised in Seattle. “I ducked out of the way of mine, but I had blood and slime on my game plan that entire week.”
The shrapnel of scales and slime on the floor was so bad the club had to have the squad room sanitized by professional cleaners that night.
“The meeting room stunk like fish for the rest of the week,” said Payton, with a mischievous grin.
The extent Payton undergoes to pull off the stunts is just another example of his attention to detail. Early in his tenure, Payton would use speeches and guest speakers to enliven team meetings. But his approach has evolved with the times. In recent years, he’s used audiovisual aids and props to connect with his players, most of whom are of the Millennial generation.
”He’s always looking for that little nudge to get some extra energy into the team,” Lombardi said. “It’s a long season. It’s a grind. He’s looking for ways to wake guys up and get the team mentally on the same page and get them ready to play this game. You can’t get up the same way for all 16 games. There are going to be some special teams throughout the the year that you can really crank the team up. That’s one of his secrets. He knows how to get the team cranked up.”
After wins in the 2018 seasons, Payton installed temporary light and sound systems in the locker room, effectively transforming the post-game into a disco. Fred McAfee, the team’s director of player engagement, served as