Home Team (11 page)

The people of New Orleans deserved a great home team, and we were going to give it to them. You can’t do that by just hoping for change.

We had to live within the rules of the NFL. We weren’t going to ignore them. But we were committed to reviving a football team and doing what we could to revive a decimated city—even if it meant exhausting ourselves. Some of the players from that 2006 season would tell you that there were days and weeks they thought there had to be some kind of rule that prohibited pushing people so hard.

Conceptually, what we were doing wasn’t so complicated. To find a place on this roster, a player had to show three things: character, toughness and intelligence. Character. Toughness. Intelligence. Simply stated, these were our core beliefs.

Bill Belichick had instilled something similar in New England. Bill Parcells did it in Dallas and the other places he’d been. In those organizations as in ours, there was clear recognition that football isn’t just a game for mindless jocks. We wanted talented players, of course—people who had the technical skills to run, catch, throw and scramble. But the best players, the right players, are always the ones who can enrich their technique with real inner fortitude, genuine personal qualities that turn talent into greatness.

Character, toughness, intelligence. We told our scouts explicitly: Be on the lookout for players who have all three.

We wanted players we didn’t have to worry about when they left the building. There are lots of temptations in New Orleans, even after a devastating hurricane. We didn’t want players who would be in the French Quarter every night till five a.m. We wanted players with the character to know right from wrong and to conduct their lives by that knowledge. Players like that will mold a team, set high standards and give the others good reason to achieve.

The same is true with intelligence. We put up a sign in the locker room. “Smart Players Seldom Do Dumb Things.” This doesn’t mean just school smarts. Football intelligence is something more than that—part instinct, part intuition, a big part paying attention. It really comes down to judgment under pressure. How good are the decisions that you make?

And players must be tough. Whatever their talents, however good their team, a time will come when they are challenged. To overcome an injury. To persevere through defeat. To sacrifice personal glory for a higher cause. We wanted players with the toughness to make that choice and live with it.

It didn’t matter if a player had been with the team before we got here, or if he was a highly anticipated draft choice, or if he had walked in for a tryout off the street. How the players arrived at Airline Drive was unimportant to us. What they did once they got here would determine how bright their future was. Oh, and anyone who wanted to leave was more than welcome to do so.

For locker room credibility, the starkness of that was huge.

The off-season program began in March with running and weight lifting. That led up to the bonus minicamp in April, which the league allowed all new coaching staffs to hold. Next was the official minicamp at the beginning of June. At each of these turns, we pushed the players extremely hard.

The veterans got their first taste of the new Saints tempo at the April minicamp. We purposely scheduled this before the draft, in order to gain more insight into the roster we’d inherited. The moment the opening horn blasted, the players immediately knew they had never attended a minicamp quite like this, nothing as fast and demanding.

In near-unison, a dozen coaches began to shout orders. But Joe Vitt’s South Jersey sandpaper was somehow the loudest of all.

“Get your ass over here,” he was yelling. “This isn’t a country club. We’re not gonna get our asses kicked like we have in the past. Not gonna happen. Not as long as I’m here.”

This was not gentle persuasion. This was the earsplitting definition of in-your-face.

Curtis Johnson, our wide receivers coach, was competing with Vitt for oxygen. From Joe Horn on down, all of the players seemed to understand that things were different now.

We didn’t give anyone any time for bad body language or stray opinions. It was law and order around here. No Lay-Z-Boys and no lazy boys. The evaluation process had begun.

In early June, the rookies arrived on Airline Drive. We kept going, and we were going hard. The rookies knew immediately they were behind where the veterans were.

By and large, most of the team seemed to grasp the new expectations. There were some exceptions. Donté Stallworth, the Saints’ first-round draft pick in 2002 and thirteenth overall that year, showed up late for mandatory team meetings more than once. I had a word with Donté after the second time. “I’m dying to trade or cut you,” I told him. “You’re making it easy for me.”

Donté had been a player who’d flashed signs of greatness—superior speed and some big play-making ability. But his career to that point had been plagued by inconsistency and injuries. And he wasn’t doing much to reverse the impression that he was a slacker. In this new Saints offense, someone who was unreliable would have a hard time fitting in.

Defensive tackle Jonathan Sullivan was another player who showed up on the radar—and not in a good way. He too was a first-round pick, sixth overall, the Saints had traded up for in 2003. That meant we had given up two first-round picks to draft this player. He was overweight now and didn’t seem eager to expend much extra effort. There was an unfortunate echo here. Earlier in his career, he’d been caught bellying up to the buffet in the pressroom, scooping up hot dogs on a game day. The media had had a blast with that. He too had flashed some signs of promise—and way too many signs of falling short.

Both players were soon on other rosters.

Drew Brees was another story entirely. He got to work immediately, showing himself to be precisely the kind of leader we thought we’d found. With his slowly healing shoulder, he wouldn’t be able to throw a football until the end of July. But in mid-April, when the first minicamp started, he refused to stand on the sidelines and just watch. He called the plays in the huddle. He went to the line of scrimmage. He established the cadence. He didn’t take the snaps: The other quarterbacks got the reps and threw the balls. But Drew was a key presence in practice from the very start. He was already beginning to develop a rapport with the team. He just didn’t throw at first.

His shoulder was only starting to mend. But his leadership was never impaired. In the huddle, in the locker room, in the weight room, in the meetings—he understood exactly what we were trying to do. He got it. He was still new to the program, but he was already one of the main leaders of the team. And this was a locker room full of people trying to find themselves. There were veterans from the old regime. There were new players who’d just shown up. People were just getting to know one another. There was a lot going on here. But Drew was always highly regimented, and he pushed himself and the others around him extraordinarily hard. He had a routine. He stuck with it. It set a powerful example.

When practice was over for the day, he would remain on the field with several other players and go back through the practice from start to finish, going over whatever repetitions he’d missed. He did everything at a full-speed tempo except throw.

All the while, we were assessing everyone: people on our team as well as all the players on the other thirty-one teams. Every team in the league has a pro-scouting department. We took the grades and reports from ours very seriously. Who was still out there that we could maybe grab now? How did they compare to the guys we had in the building? Do they have qualities that might be the right addition for the Saints? We often talked to our players about this process. It was important for everyone to understand: “Don’t just look closely at our own depth chart. You’re not competing with just the players who are already here. The final fifty-three-man roster could well include players who are now on other teams. What you put on tape is your résumé.”

Clearly, Drew Brees was at the center of this team we were building. Others also began to distinguish themselves in a positive light.

Deuce McAllister, who was recovering from major knee surgery he’d had the year before, had a limited role in the off-season, much like Drew. “Much of the Saints’ future,” the sports analysts said, “will depend on where Drew and Deuce are in rehab.” That wasn’t far from the truth.

Gradually, the roster was changing dramatically. This isn’t uncommon for teams with a new coaching staff. But we were not only putting a team together, we were establishing a whole new way of life. We were a football team on permanent fast-forward.

WE WERE HAVING A
good initial run. We were getting important work accomplished. It had been difficult and demanding, but most of the players were responding. We were changing the culture. We were exhausting everyone. One thing we were learning: When you set super-high standards, some people will actually meet them. And when you see who doesn’t, you don’t have to continue to waste time on the people who aren’t right. We were beginning to get a good grasp on what we had and what we did not.

And this was just minicamp.

But we didn’t want to kill these guys. Before we broke for the summer, before we headed off for our official training camp, we decided to take one day and do something different with the team. We needed a break.

Back in the day, a coach might take his players bowling.

A time would come in the long training season. You’d been pushing the players hard. They were pushing themselves harder. Tensions were rising. Nerves were getting raw. The coaches, the players, the staff—everyone was exhausted. It was time for a routine buster.

So you’d organize a bowling outing. Or take the team to play golf. Or maybe just cancel practice. It’s a sound, time-honored coaching technique. It helps the players blow off a load of steam, clear their heads, maybe bond a little.

Except—let’s be honest here. How much head clearing are eighty NFL players likely to do in a bowling alley? How much bonding will million-dollar athletes really achieve across eighteen fairways? How much steam will hard-charging, testosterone-fueled headbangers blow off on a free Tuesday?

Who are we kidding? This isn’t your father’s NFL.

When our guys started getting tired and tense, I knew we needed a venue that was a little more fitting for their competitive natures, aggressive tendencies and killer instincts. No offense, Brunswick, but bowling didn’t seem like the answer here.

On this particular morning, our meeting started like it always did, with the football equivalent of roll call on a cop show. An inspirational message. An overview of that day’s practice plans. Some logistical directions before we hit the field. On this day, as on many others, the lights were lowered and a PowerPoint presentation came up.

Only this was not the usual morning-meeting PowerPoint presentation. It was the opening battle scene from
Saving Private Ryan.
It’s Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. There’s a crazy firefight and—you remember—the guy pulls out a little mirror. He’s using the mirror to get the location of a German soldier. At the end of the day, the Americans are able to advance, but under heavy fire. It’s twenty-five minutes of some of the most intense moviemaking you ever saw.

The clip ended, and I spoke to the team.

“Our staff works hard,” I said. “They work hard to make sure we are covering everything. We can prepare you for the two-minute offense and the red zone and third down. But at some point, you’ll have to get into these battles yourselves. You’ll have to depend on each other. Your talent, your training and each other—that’s where your strength will come from.”

Just then, big globs of paint splattered across the video screens. Red, blue, black, followed by the words “Paintball Command”—a paintball company across Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville. Then two columns of players’ names. Those were the black and the gold paintball teams.

As the meeting was continuing, our equipment staff was in the locker room, distributing a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt to every player. Half got black ones. Half got gold. All this was done quietly during the meeting. And five buses pulled into the parking lot, each with an armed instructor who’d be riding with the players to Mandeville to brief them on what was coming next.

As soon as the video screens went dark, Steve Gleason, Drew Brees and some of the others started painting their faces. You could tell this was going to be competitive. We weren’t even on the buses yet.

It’s a forty-five-minute ride from our practice facility to the paintball place. Along the way, the instructors showed the players how to load the paint pellets, how to aim the rifles and how to shoot. They explained the rules of engagement and what constitutes a kill. “These are weapons,” the instructor on our bus said. “Please don’t be shooting each other from three feet away.”

Paintball Command is not somewhere you would just stumble on. It’s off a highway, down a gravel road through the woods. You make a left and then a right. You have to want to find it. On the property, there are a few modulars with cash registers and a staging area. There’s a grove, where later we’d eat oysters and barbecue and give out awards. But when we drove up, the layout really did seem like some military-ops location. There were a bunch of old wooden spools. There was black mesh netting just hanging there. The place looked like something you’d see in upstate Washington, maybe, or some militant skinhead outpost. It was big. It was all spread out. There were lots of trees. There was a huge wooden fort that you knew at some point one team would be defending and the other team would be trying to take.

The CO
₂
canisters were already in the paint guns. The paintball pellets were stacked in bags near the guns. We had everything we needed for a long drawn-out firefight. I think we went through about $6,000 worth of ammo that day.