Home Team (19 page)

It turned out the Colts weren’t using Lucas Oil Stadium that week. They were still at training camp in Terre Haute, Indiana. So, eight hundred and fifteen miles from New Orleans, with Gustav swirling and the Weather Channel on, we prepared for the opening game of the 2008 season.

Some people might think of this scenario as a bad distraction. Maybe it was worrisome for the fans. But it created a change of scenery for us. It focused everyone’s attention. And, thankfully, Gustav veered west. It dumped some water around New Orleans and caused some flooding, but it was no repeat of Katrina. We went back to the Superdome and beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 24-20.

2008 had its frustrations, but it got us used to life on the road. Our 8-8 record wouldn’t be enough to get us into the play-offs. But that comfort on the road would serve us very well at the end of the following year.

For several years, the NFL has been working to popularize American football around the world. As part of that effort, we were asked to play the San Diego Chargers at Wembley Stadium in London in Week Eight. I was disappointed. Not because I don’t like London. I do. But this game would count as a home game for us, and I hated to give up the home-team advantage of playing in the Superdome, even for one game. It’s a little easier to swallow if it’s an away game. You’re traveling anyway. But to lose a home game is different.

Talk about cultural diversity. The Who Dats in London! Crawfish and crumpets! The common ground was good beer. And the locals treated us like, well, royalty. Our following was growing stronger and stronger. New Orleans’ home team was picking up fans everywhere. Even in England, people were wearing black and gold.

In the end the experience was a pleasure for all of us. Our players loved London. Our team won the game. Rita Benson LeBlanc and Tom and Gayle Benson did an excellent job hosting the team, the employees, and their families. Everyone did their part—our equipment staff, the video people and the training crew. Football-operations chief James Nagaoka, our everything man Jay Romig—those guys were key. Despite my early reservations, events like this one brought us closer together as an organization. We were getting the one-week road routine down pat. Just like on a concert tour, we brought everything. A year and a half later, this very same traveling road show would pack up its act and head to Miami for an even bigger game.

Something else was becoming apparent: how much we depended on our two main football scouts, Rick Reiprish and Ryan Pace. The strength of our roster over the years has benefited tremendously from the work of these two men and their staffs.

Rick is our director of college scouting. His job is to scour the college ranks for potential Saints players. He studies players. He reviews statistics. He interviews coaches at colleges large and small. He attends more bowl games than anyone should ever attend. His Super Bowl every year is the NFL college draft. Rick and his staff guide all our decisions there. Their efforts didn’t begin and end with Reggie Bush. They’ve also brought us Jahri Evans, Marques Colston, Tracy Porter and many other valuable Saints.

Ryan is our pro-scouting director. He and his staff keep an up-to-date go-to list for every position on the field. Ryan knows the free agents. He knows who is about to go on waivers from the other teams. He knows who’s doing anything in the Canadian Football League and elsewhere. If a defensive end or offensive guard gets injured in a game on Sunday, by Monday morning Ryan will be telling Mickey and me: “OK, here are our possibilities. Here are the three best players available now. I can fly all three in tonight. We’ll work them out tomorrow.” And by Tuesday night, that position will be filled. Ryan finds players like Jon Vilma, David Thomas, Garrett Hartley, Mike Bell, Jeff Charleston, Darren Sharper and many other great finds. It’s his job to bring them to Mickey and me.

But we still had a season to finish and some lessons to learn. Thank God we had advisers like Joey Imparato.

Joey was a high school classmate of mine, a street kid from Chicago. As teenagers, we’d played poker at his house. His parents were divorced. We all thought his stepfather was in the mob. I have no idea if that was true.

He was just one of these little wise guys, Joey was. If you heard him talk, you’d think he was a little shady. After high school, Joey went on to Las Vegas. I went on to playing and coaching. He worked at a casino for a couple of years, and then he had an accident in Vegas. No one knows the details of it. But he walked with a limp after that and used a cane.

Joey was down in Florida now, married, no kids. But somewhere along this journey, Joey showed back up in my life.

“Tampa Bay,” “Coach,” “tickets”—classic Imparato. I arranged for him to come to a game. Within twenty minutes, he was talking to a national sportswriter. Then he had a hot dog in the owner’s suite. Joey’s a guy who, once he’s in the building, you can’t get rid of him. We all know a guy like Joey.

After that, Joey developed a routine with me. He’d call my cell phone every Thursday with what he thought should be my message for the team before the next game. Joey loves sports. He used to play sports, and he’d been studying coaching for years. One thing Joey has is an ability to get a good read on people.

So every Thursday I would get a voice mail. Often, there would be a second one because the time on the first voice mail had run out.

We’d be on the team plane. I’d say to the guys, “You gotta fuckin’ hear Imparato this week.” I’d put the speaker on and Mickey, Gregg Williams, Joe Vitt and I would all lean toward my cell phone.

Every time we go on a trip, it’s, “Hey, did Joey call?”

“Yeah, wait till you hear it.”

We went to Detroit. This was just before Christmas 2008. The Lions hadn’t won a game all year. We were 7-7. They were 0-14.

Joey had some thoughts.

“Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, baby—now pay attention,” he said. “This week’s fuckin’ easy. I’m puttin’ this week on coaching. Now listen to me, you guys are way the fuck better than the DEE-troit Lions, but if you go in there and fuckin’ fart around for a quarter and a half and lose this game, you’ll have a shit-eatin’ Christmas. Tell these fuckin’ guys they gotta come in and”—Joey delivered one of his better rants.

We were on the plane. It was hilarious. It was awesome. “You’ll have a shit-eating Christmas.” Who says that?

When we got to the hotel in Detroit, I went to see the banquet manager and asked: “Can you get me a loudspeaker system in the team meeting room so I can hold this phone up to the microphone and have everyone hear it clearly?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.”

We had our pregame meeting, and as we were winding down, I said: “Look, some of you haven’t met this guy. Some of you may have seen him at a practice. I went to high school with him.” I gave them a little rundown of Joey’s background—the casino work, the mysterious accident, the weekly phone calls. “He follows us very closely, and every Thursday I get one of these calls. It’s his message to you guys.”

A few players looked sideways, not quite sure what to make of the concept of getting advice from one of the coach’s hometown pals. But they humored me.

I went on. “I listen. I chuckle. Sometimes it’s humorous. Sometimes he’s right on. Other times, he’s way off base. But I want to play this one for you. He’s dead-on here. Joey Imparato.”

I hit PLAY on the voice mail, and there was Joey’s voice.

“If you don’t fuckin’ get off the fuckin’ plane ready to kick some ass, it’ll be your worst fuckin’ Christmas—you go get their ass. You hear me? You tell these fuckin’ guys it’s all on the coaches—every one of your fuckin’ coaches better get their guys goin’.”

The players were just howling at Joey’s advice. I’m not sure if it was Joey’s language, his accent or the sharpness of his insights. Probably some combination of all three.

But let me tell you, Joey connected that day.

And as Joey would put it, we kicked the shit outta Detroit that week. It was 42-7, fuggedaboutit! I’m not sure how much credit Joey deserves. But his inspirational words certainly didn’t hurt.

Of course Joey heard about what I had done. He doesn’t miss too much. And it only encouraged him. “Coach, hear me out now,” he said the following week, which was the Carolina Panthers at home. “This is a two-part deal here…” And Joey was on to the next game.

Joey was never going away.

THERE IS NO SUCH
thing as a perfect game, much less a perfect season. Football is a complex human endeavor, encompassing a nearly infinite number of decisions, calls, moves, plays and strokes of luck. There is no way to do everything perfectly. So even if a team wins 50-0, that doesn’t mean every player did what he was supposed to. It doesn’t mean every play call was right. It doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned and improvement to be made.

In football as in life, perfect is an ideal—and remains one.

That said, every game will have a winner and a loser, and the record book counts a win as a win. So as each new season draws near, greatness as defined by a long string of victories is always a genuine hope if not an actual possibility. So it was with the 2009 New Orleans Saints.

And we weren’t just dreaming this time.

There are only thirty-two teams in the National Football League. Each year, two or three of those teams will make a crucial leap from 8-8 into the postseason play. As we moved into the 2009 season, we had two strong reasons for hoping one of those teams would be us.

We felt like our off-season acquisitions were going to help us. We had signed Darren Sharper and Jabari Greer. Jeremy Shockey, Jonathan Vilma and Tracy Porter were going to be healthy. These were key improvements at key positions.

And we hired Gregg Williams. That was huge. We needed someone who could bring a little swagger to the defense, someone who could raise the confidence level a bit, someone who could help us build a truly complementary game.

During our 8-8 ’08 season, many people had been saying, “They were first in the NFL in offense. If only they had a defense.” The reality was not quite so one-sided. We had failed offensively at Washington to convert a third and short and close that game out. We had failed offensively at Denver to take advantage of field position. We had failed offensively in a handful of games in our ability to run the football. Those failures also hurt our defense.

So it wasn’t just the D half of our team that had created disappointment.

Still, while we worked to sharpen our running game, we needed new leadership on defense. I had to fire Gary Gibbs, our defensive coordinator, and that was hard. Gary was the first person I had hired. We’d flown to New Orleans on Mr. Benson’s plane and checked in to that seedy hotel where the furniture kept falling apart. Gary was still waiting for that six a.m. wake-up call. Together, he and I had laid down the don’t-blame-Katrina rule.

But I was convinced Gregg Williams was the guy.

Gregg had spent the year in Jacksonville, and it hadn’t been a good fit for him. I’d never met him before, but I had seen Gregg when he was with the Redskins and I was with the Giants and the Cowboys. He was always tough. He brought real confidence. And people around the league respected him. I would not describe him as wild. But he definitely had an ego. And he was fearless about saying what was on his mind.

Other teams were interested in hiring him—Green Bay and Tennessee and Houston. But he liked the idea of coming to New Orleans with Drew Brees. As defensive coordinator, he knew he would have that support offensively. And we also had a position we could offer his son, who had graduated from Princeton and was working as a coaching assistant in Jacksonville.

But there was a money issue. In our league, $1.5 million for a high-end defensive coordinator is not considered crazy money or way too high. Some might argue it’s a pretty good deal for a team. But we had a set budget to work within and not much wiggle room. The offer was $1.25 million.

Mickey and I were having this discussion on a Friday night. I had a few beers in me. I had just signed a new contract for myself. I guess I was feeling flush. “Take $250,000 out of my salary,” I told Mickey. “And let’s get it to that million-five number. Let’s not lose out on this opportunity over $250,000.”

I wanted Mickey and Mr. Benson to see the confidence I had in my decision to hire Gregg.

I understand the ownership pressures here. You bring in a new guy. For some period, you’re still paying the salary of the guy who left, whose contract still has time on it. So it’s easy for me to say, “We want to get this guy”—but there’s a lot that goes into it. I just wanted to say, “Hey, I feel strongly about the decision.”

Mickey spoke to Mr. Benson and called me back.

“We’ll do this,” he said. “We’ll make the offer.”

“That’s just for year one,” I said, making sure my gesture of confidence didn’t run too far out of control. “Not every year. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.”

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my wife said to me: “You did what?”

Gregg, to his credit, never said anything about the money to me. Not until we were on the field after the Super Bowl, waiting for the trophy to be presented, would he allude to it at all.

“I never brought up the money,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” I told him.

“I appreciate that,” he said.

“I know you did,” I said. “Listen, it was worth it.”

Enough said.

One other fact made it easier for me to be gracious. At the end of the season, Mr. Benson wrote me a check to cover what I’d pitched in. I think he wanted to do that at the start of the season. I don’t think he paid me back just because we were winning. “He just was appreciative that you felt that strongly about the decision,” Mickey said.

So Gregg’s arrival was a big reason for the optimism. From the start, he was working well with the defensive coaches who were already with us. He meshed well with Joe Vitt. There was a better balance now on the team. The secondary got a face-lift. The leadership had changed. The attitude had changed too.