Payton and Brees, стр. 67
“Coaching is like gardening: you’ve got to do it every day,” Payton said. “It needs that constant attention to detail. If you’re not careful things can go south quickly. Coaching can grind on you and one of the first things that goes is the attention to detail. It happens with players and coaches. At some point, they’re retired and haven’t announced it yet. It’s human nature. We all lost track of what it was that had given us a chance to be successful. I don’t know that there was a specific day that it happened, but it was ignored, starting with me.”
The first step Payton and Loomis took to address their locker room issues was to hire Jeff Ireland as director of college scouting. Ireland was a Parcells acolyte who had been the general manager of the Miami Dolphins from 2008 to 2013. When the Chicago Bears hired Saints director of player personnel Ryan Pace, Payton pushed for Loomis to hire Ireland and replace Rick Reiprish as the head of the team’s personnel department. Ireland had a golden reputation around the league as a shrewd talent evaluator. Ireland would oversee the Saints’ drafts and was charged with finding players that fit the Saints’ profile. Payton and Loomis wanted smart, high-character, mentally tough players who were passionate about football, the kind of players who were the foundation of the club’s famed 2006 draft class and formed the core of the 2009 Super Bowl team.
By the time Ireland was hired, most of the work had been done for the 2015 draft. But as soon as the 2015 draft ended, he immediately went to work overhauling the scouting department. He dismissed three scouts and hired four new ones. Over the next few seasons he would essentially remake the entire department, and the results showed in his draft selections. During Ireland’s first four years of overseeing the NFL Draft, the Saints selected Michael Thomas, Sheldon Rankins, Vonn Bell, David Onyemata, Marshon Lattimore, Ryan Ramczyk, Alvin Kamara, Marcus Williams, Marcus Davenport, Erik McCoy, and C.J. Gardner-Johnson, a group that would form the core of the roster in subsequent years.
“Our goal was to find guys that were unselfish and put the team first,” Payton said. “There’s an accountability that comes with that. The turnaround had to start with the players we were bringing into the building. If we’re not signing or drafting the right player, then it becomes more challenging. Getting the right leadership and creating the right atmosphere in the locker room was critical.”
Payton and Loomis didn’t stop there. They made another difficult move in Week 11 of the 2015 season, when they fired Ryan as defensive coordinator and promoted Dennis Allen to the role. The move to the Seahawks-style defense had been an unmitigated disaster and the Saints defense nosedived to the bottom of the league rankings. In 2015, they allowed an NFL-record 45 touchdown passes and an opposing passer rating of 116.1. They finished 31st in the league in total defense (413.4 yards per game allowed) for a second consecutive season and were dead last in scoring defense (29.8 points per game allowed).
And while Payton believed hiring Ireland and promoting Allen were steps in the right direction, his relationship with Loomis had continued to devolve behind the scenes. The back-to-back losing seasons in 2014 and 2015 strained the entire organization and exacerbated the issues between the two leaders. By the end of the 2015 season, things were growing worse instead of getting better.
“There’s nothing in that building that goes on that Sean doesn’t know about, and he would get mad about the dumbest things,” said Mike Ornstein, a longtime marketing executive and friend and business associate of Payton and Loomis. “Sean was treating people so poorly, and Mickey would have to deal with it. It had gotten so ugly between Sean and Mickey that either Sean was going to get fired or he was going to quit.”
Payton had become so frustrated he began to seriously explore an exit strategy. He leaned on his mentor, Bill Parcells, who was a proponent of change. During his Hall of Fame career as a coach and general manager, Parcells famously moved from job to job, rarely staying with one club longer than four seasons. Payton had always believed he would coach in New Orleans for his entire career. But the situation had become so frustrating to him, he now was seriously considering a move for the first time.
Payton, through intermediaries including Ornstein himself, held back-channel talks with the San Francisco 49ers and Indianapolis Colts after the 2015 season. The 49ers and Colts were attractive for different reasons. The Colts were rebuilding around quarterback Andrew Luck, whom Payton viewed as a Brees-like franchise talent. The 49ers were run by general manager Trent Baalke, a Parcells protégé, and owned a bevy of draft picks and salary cap space to facilitate their rebuilding plan. Each was a potential quick fix, certainly less challenging than the job he inherited in New Orleans. But neither the Colts nor 49ers situation ever grew serious enough to merit a formal interview. Instead, Payton and Loomis conducted a series of in-depth meetings after the season and mended fences, and Payton signed a five-year contract extension that paid him $9.5 million annually, compensation that made him the second-highest-paid coach in the NFL behind only Bill Belichick.
During an emotional press conference on January 6, 2016, Payton pledged his commitment to the organization and city. NFL head coaches typically conduct postseason press briefings to wrap up the year, but this get-together was different. Payton spoke for 61 minutes. The session was conducted in the Saints media room rather than on the practice field and was attended by Loomis,