Payton and Brees, стр. 66
“Sean has remarkable attention to detail, that obsession with the little things,” Loomis said. “He’s just concerned about every little thing that he sees. That’s part of what makes him a great coach. So if sometimes I have to put up with a screaming match from him about something that’s bothering him, then that’s okay.”
In a league filled with big egos and publicity hounds, Loomis’ modest comportment is rare. Rather than hog the spotlight, he shuns it. A protégé of former Seattle Seahawks and Carolina Panthers president Mike McCormick, Loomis joined the Saints in 2000 as the team’s salary cap negotiator under general manager Randy Mueller. Loomis made a positive impression with the frugal Benson as a tough negotiator, not only with player agents but also with hotel managers over the team’s travel expenses. When Benson abruptly fired Mueller in 2002, it took him only a few days to promote Loomis to general manager.
Loomis’ management style mirrored that of McCormick, who believed that the head coach and players were the faces of the franchise. The general manager’s job, in Loomis’ mind, was to support the players and coaches and take the heat when times grew tough. Loomis preferred to operate in the shadows. And his quiet, steady demeanor proved to be the perfect counterbalance to the brash, volatile Payton. While they owned decidedly different personalities, both men were self-aware enough to know they needed the other to be successful. When they had their run-ins, they usually managed to quickly find common ground and smooth things over.
“I think we have complementary personalities and skill sets,” Loomis said of Payton. “It doesn’t mean we always agree. But we appreciate each other’s perspective and try to accommodate what the other person wants.”
After the ugly 2014 season, both Payton and Loomis knew they needed to make major changes, starting with the defense, which had fallen to historic levels of incompetence. Several core players from the team’s successful Super Bowl era—Will Smith, Jon Vilma, Malcolm Jenkins, Roman Harper, Jabari Greer—either retired or left via free agency. The vacuum was filled with talented but unreliable players like Brandon Browner, Junior Galette, Keenan Lewis, and Kenny Vaccaro. Discipline became an issue—on and off the field.
Payton also played a part in the defensive downfall. When he moved on from defensive coordinator Gregg Williams in the wake of the bounty scandal in 2012, he hired Steve Spagnuolo and abruptly fired him a year later without ever actually coaching a game with him. Payton then hired Rob Ryan in 2013 in a move that many longtime observers questioned from the start. Ryan, the brother of former Buffalo Bills and New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, was respected for his defensive knowledge, but his defenses had a reputation for being undisciplined, mistake-prone units, the exact opposite of Payton’s highly synchronized offenses. Many thought the pairing of the exacting Payton and the laissez-faire Ryan was doomed from the start. Ryan installed the 3-4 defense that he and his brother had run so successfully in Baltimore and other stops around the NFL. But a year later, Payton changed plans and instructed Ryan to switch to a Seattle Seahawks–style defense built around safety Jairus Byrd, the team’s prized free agent signing in 2014, and big cornerbacks like Lewis, Brandon Browner, and Stanley Jean-Baptiste. A good soldier, Ryan did as he was told, even though he privately questioned the decision.
Things were starting to slip elsewhere, too. While Payton remained as dedicated as ever to film study and game-planning, his attention to detail in other matters started to wane. Team meetings sometimes began late. Walk-through practices were sloppy.
Things got so bad late in the 2014 season, veteran offensive tackle Zach Strief felt the need to meet with Payton and address some of the issues he saw undermining the team, most of which pointed directly at Payton himself. It took two weeks and multiple phone calls with his father for Strief to muster the courage to handle the face-to-face sit-down.
“As one of the leaders of the team, I felt like I had to do it,” Strief said. “Drew is the unquestioned leader of our team, but he was so focused on what he was doing and was so close to the situation I don’t think he was aware of what was going on. There were things that used to be important to Sean that suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore, things that he used to be concerned about that he no longer was. I told him, there were problems. We’re doing stuff that we don’t do. We don’t start meetings eight minutes late. We just don’t. We never have. It sets a bad precedent.”
As Strief continued, Payton pulled out a notebook from his desk drawer and jotted down each item from Strief’s list. By the time they were finished 40 minutes later, the entire notepad was filled.
“That was a difficult meeting,” Strief said. “There was one thing on the list that he said was bullshit, but everything else he agreed with. I don’t think it was anything intentional on his part, but things had just started to slip. It’s just human nature. It happens to people. But it takes a very special mentality and self-awareness for someone to sit there and accept criticism from, quite frankly, a very average player and not get upset. He didn’t reinvent himself after that meeting, but he just sort of refocused. I gained the ultimate respect for him for the way he handled it.”
To his credit, Payton accepted responsibility for the fall-off and didn’t make excuses, even though he had plenty. At the time, he was navigating the fallout from his 2012 divorce from his wife of 20 years, Beth. As the marriage fell apart in late 2011, the family relocated to Westlake, Texas, a tony suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The news made headlines across New