Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (5 page)

But Brees’s shoulder injury changed everything. Chargers general manager A. J. Smith wasn’t going to franchise Brees again, not when he had suffered a major injury and not when he wanted to get Rivers on the field anyway. San Diego wished Brees well, and he became a free agent. He went to Birmingham, Alabama, where famed orthopedist Dr. James Andrews rebuilt his damaged throwing shoulder.

Brees was the perfect quarterback for Payton—if he was healthy. If Payton had Brees’s talent, it’s how he would have played the game. The Saints and the Dolphins were the only teams interested. Payton flew to Birmingham in Benson’s plane and picked up Brees and his wife, Brittany, and brought them to New Orleans. “We had a well-planned day,” Payton said. “We wanted to make sure he saw the challenges we had.”

Payton had never met Brees. “I knew of him and scouted him, and his work habits were unbelievable,” he said.

Just a couple of months earlier, Payton hired Pete Carmichael Jr. off the Chargers staff to be his quarterback coach. He had been the quality control coach in San Diego. He later became the Saints’ offensive coordinator. Payton was just putting together his offensive playbook and was going to be flexible with the terminology. They had a Powerpoint presentation prepared for Brees on his visit. Once Brees signed, they gave him input on how he wanted certain plays labeled. “If I called a play Sail and Drew called it Flutie, then we will change it to Flutie,” Payton said. “We’re all going to learn it for the first time; the protection system and the run game were
set up. But where we could take plays he was familiar with in San Diego and use that same terminology, it just made sense.”

Payton and Brees spent three hours on football to make sure he understood that Payton had a plan and that it could work if Brees was the quarterback. Payton helped the Giants get to a Super Bowl with Kerry Collins, and in his first year in Dallas, he squeezed a playoff year out of Carter. After working on selling himself as the right coach, Payton had to persuade Brees and his wife that New Orleans was going to be the right place to raise a family. Payton drove the Breeses to the North Shore, about forty-five minutes from the Saints’ complex. They looked around some subdivisions, and then it was Payton’s intention to drive them to their hotel before having dinner at 7 p.m. The problem was that Payton was not yet familiar with the area and got lost on the way back. He made it to the twenty-one-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain without a problem. “It’s just a long, long flat bridge,” Payton said. “So we came across the causeway heading to the facility, and I got off on the wrong road. I knew better. I should have had somebody with me that knew the area. So we’re driving, we’re driving. It wasn’t twenty minutes out of the way. Now we’re about fifty minutes. And I’m looking in the rearview mirror, and poor Brittany is dosing off. I’m on the cell phone with Mickey, and he’s trying to get me back. So instead of being back by three, it’s four thirty.”

Payton couldn’t help thinking that on his first big free agent recruiting venture he had lost his man. “I thought we’ve got no chance,” he said.

Payton salvaged the night with a dinner reservation at Emeril’s, one of the best restaurants in the French Quarter. The next morning, Brees was on a flight to Miami, which was considered his preferred destination. The Dolphins also were considering former Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper, whose season ended in 2005 when he tore three knee ligaments. Even so, the Dolphins doctors considered Culpepper less of a medical risk than Brees, and Miami never offered Brees a contract. It was a decision
that sent the franchise reeling. Instead of signing Brees, whose shoulder was fully healed in time for him to participate in training camp, they sent a second-round draft choice to the Vikings for Culpepper, who started and played in only four games in his single season with the Dolphins, which was cut short by shoulder and knee problems.

One week after Payton got lost driving him around New Orleans, Brees called back to say he was accepting the Saints’ offer.

“I just felt that energy in New Orleans,” Brees said. “From the very beginning there was a genuine feeling that they wanted me there. They believe I can come back from this shoulder injury and lead them to a championship. They were as confident as I am, and that meant a lot.”

Brees signed a six-year $60 million contract. The only risk was the $8 million signing bonus. Once Brees showed he was healthy, and that didn’t take very long, he was a bargain.

He led the Saints to the NFC championship game in his first season in New Orleans and was the Super Bowl MVP in his fourth season. He was devastated when Payton was suspended in 2012 and has come to his defense. Payton reached out to Bill Belichick to consult with him on how to handle the public side of the fallout from the scandal. Belichick once was fined $500,000 by Goodell after the Patriots were caught videotaping opponents’ defensive signals, a violation of NFL rules. Goodell did not suspend Belichick, although the punishment would have fit the crime.

“Once you get to the top of the mountain, you’ve got to begin the journey to go back up,” Payton said.

He was talking about his team. He could have been talking about himself.

Joe Gibbs
caught the football world looking the other way in 2004 when he finally relented to the full-court press put on by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and jumped out of the NASCAR pits to come out of retirement and coach the Redskins once again. Snyder idolized Gibbs as a kid growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and purchased the team in 1999, seven years after Gibbs left. It had been more than ten dreary years for the ’Skins without Joe.

The Redskins were in serious need of instant credibility by 2004. Snyder was only thirty-three years old when he became the owner. With his tender age, lack of experience in the football business, and abrasive personality, he quickly developed a reputation as an impetuous and impossible person to work for and a man no coach would want in control of his football future.

Gibbs was an icon. He had won three Super Bowls with the Redskins and had done it with three different quarterbacks: Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, and Mark Rypien. His third Super Bowl followed the 1991 season. In 1992, Gibbs formed the Joe Gibbs Racing Team, and after spending one more year with the Redskins, he decided to devote all his attention to NASCAR. The Redskins promoted defensive coordinator Richie Petitbon to replace Gibbs, but he was gone after one season when Washington went a dismal 4–12. Next, Jack Kent Cooke went outside
the organization for Norv Turner, who had just helped the rival Cowboys win Super Bowls two years in a row. His work in developing Troy Aikman was instrumental in returning Dallas to prominence.

By the time Snyder became Turner’s boss, he was entering his sixth year as the Redskins’ coach and had not made the playoffs. It’s inevitable in the NFL that coaches will be fired, especially when a new owner puts down a good chunk of his life savings and expects instant gratification. The clock was ticking on Turner the moment Snyder signed the last piece of paper on his purchase. He received a stay of execution when the Redskins made the playoffs in Snyder’s first season and then won a playoff game, but he was gone with three games to go in 2000. Snyder had been looking for the right time to fire Turner, and that came after a loss to the Giants that made the team’s record 7–6. Terry Robiskie finished out the 8–8 season as the interim coach.

Snyder went for a big name when he hired Marty Schottenheimer, but when a power struggle ensued after another 8–8 season, Schottenheimer was fired. Snyder thought he won the lottery when he hired Steve Spurrier, who just ten days earlier had surprisingly resigned after twelve years coaching at the University of Florida, his alma mater. Spurrier built a powerhouse in Gainesville and had been highly sought after in the NFL, but he repeatedly refused to leave the comfort zone he established in Florida. Besides, coaching in the NFL would drastically reduce the number of tee times Spurrier could fit into his schedule during the season and in the off-season. Spurrier lasted only two years in Washington—7–9 and 5–11—and left when it was clear that NFL coaching life was not for him: training camp, the regular season, the NFL Combine, free agency, the draft, minicamps, organized team activities (OTAs)—that didn’t leave a big window for setting up tee times. He made $10 million for his twelve victories and soon was back in college coaching at South Carolina.

Now Snyder was in a jam, and his idol bailed him out. He found
Gibbs at a time in his life when he was willing to get back into the grind. Not surprisingly, Gibbs was successful in the racing business. His team won the Sprint Cup Series in 2000 and 2002, and by 2004 Gibbs felt comfortable relocating back to Virginia from Charlotte. Could his Redskins enjoy the same success again?

Snyder made him the highest paid coach in the NFL with a five-year $28.5 million deal. For that price, he also bought himself a lot of goodwill with Redskins fans. Gibbs was beloved in Washington. Snyder was not, but he hit a home run. It was an excellent public relations move even if there were doubts about Gibbs’s ability to recapture his old magic after being gone so long. It wasn’t the first time Snyder had tried to persuade Gibbs to come home and save the Redskins. Now he was going to get his chance, and even after being out of football for the last eleven seasons, he was a better choice than Jim Fassel, Dennis Green, and Ray Rhodes, the other candidates interviewed. Gibbs brought instant credibility.

The money was great, and Gibbs hired his son Coy to be on his staff. Coy wanted to get into coaching, and this gave Gibbs a chance to ease his son into the business and keep his family close to him. But he also was putting his reputation on the line by giving this another shot. He was already in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Anything short of a fourth Super Bowl title to go with the three Vince Lombardi Trophies that were sitting in the lobby at Redskins Park would be a disappointment.

“There is no net,” Gibbs said. “I am hanging. There is nothing down there to catch us. That may be the biggest thrill. Knowing how hard it is and to get the chance to do something super-hard. It’s probably going to be one of the toughest deals you can imagine.”

At his introductory news conference on January 8, 2004, many of Gibbs’s former players came by to lend their support, including Darrell Green, Art Monk, and Gary Clark. Gibbs spoke for forty-five minutes without naming one current Redskins player. He had
a lot of catching up to do. But he didn’t become one of the all-time best coaches in NFL history by cutting corners. He would put in the hours, Snyder would spend the money, and pretty soon the fans would be singing “Hail to the Redskins” and really mean it.

Gibbs had a formidable challenge. He had been gone from the league since 1992, and a lot had changed in the way the NFL conducted business. It was a different game. There was free agency and the salary cap. It was the new world of NFL finances and player movement. The Redskins were a dominant team in the twelve seasons Gibbs coached them in Act 1—they made the Super Bowl four times and won three of those games. But now he was inheriting a team that had made the playoffs just once in the little more than a decade during which he was gone.

The good news was that the Redskins were bad enough in 2003 that Gibbs inherited the fifth pick in a draft loaded with talented players. Mississippi quarterback Eli Manning went first to the Chargers, Iowa offensive tackle Robert Gallery second to the Raiders, Pittsburgh wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald third to the Cardinals, and North Carolina State quarterback Philip Rivers fourth to the Giants. The Giants immediately traded Rivers to the Chargers along with picks in the first, third, and fifth rounds for Manning, a daring move that paid off with two Super Bowl titles in Manning’s first eight seasons.

The three best players left on the draft board when it came time for Paul Tagliabue to announce the Redskins’ pick were quarterback Ben Roethlisberger from Miami of Ohio and safety Sean Taylor and tight end Kellen Winslow from the University of Miami. The Redskins had selected quarterback Patrick Ramsey with their first-round choice in 2002. He was a developing player. That ruled out Roethlisberger, which became a mistake when Ramsey turned out to be a dud and Big Ben won two Super Bowls in his first five seasons. The Redskins gave strong consideration to Taylor and Winslow. They selected Taylor, a phenomenal athlete, perhaps the next Ronnie Lott. Safeties are a low-priority position
and usually do not get taken very high in the draft. Lott was the overall eighth pick by the 49ers in 1981, and he began his career at cornerback, a more valued position. But he made the Hall of Fame because he was one of the greatest safeties to ever play the game.

The Redskins spent a lot of time in Miami with Taylor before the draft and felt confident that he was going to be a big-time player for them. They decided he was their guy. But once they selected him, he was difficult for Gibbs to read. “He was kind of standoffish. It was hard for me to get in contact with him,” Gibbs said. “He wouldn’t return phone calls. Now once you got him on the field, he was great. As a matter of fact, this guy loved football. He felt like he was made to play football. He probably could have been a running back; he could have been a heckuva receiver. We played him some at receiver. He was obviously a great safety. But he also could have been a corner. Real competitive.”