Home Team (15 page)

And suddenly we had some momentum to build on. Three wins and no losses to open the season, we—a team that could barely get on the field the previous year—were leading the NFC South. Amazing! In a city where everything was going slower, costing more and facing setbacks, here were the Saints, back at home and doing better than anyone imagined we would. If 2009 would become a year of jubilation, 2006 was a year of hope.

Everywhere I went after the return to the Dome, people approached me. Almost overnight, I’d gone from the anonymity of the CVS line and Pat O’Brien’s to someone people recognized and were happy to see.

“Thank you so much for being here,” they said.

“We’re so glad you guys are back.”

Even when we lost in Week Four—21-18 at Carolina—we could hold our heads up. These players were actually in the game. We gave Jake Delhomme and the Panthers a real fight. Deuce McAllister pulled us ahead in the fourth quarter. It just wasn’t quite enough. Carolina answered with two quick touchdowns. We needed more than Brees’s eighty-six-yard touchdown pass to Marques Colston, although that was certainly nice.

Yes, we lost the game that day. But we weren’t a team of losers. And so it went, game after game.

We beat Tampa Bay, 24-21, on our first trip back to the Superdome after the big night. On a last-second thirty-one-yard kick by John Carney, we slipped past Philadelphia, also at home, 27-24. The Ravens stopped us in the Superdome, but we turned right around and showed Tampa Bay that our previous Buccaneers victory wasn’t a fluke—and we beat them in their house this time.

The rough patch came in Weeks Eleven and Twelve. The Steelers beat us in Pittsburgh. The Bengals beat us at home. People began to wonder if our momentum was starting to fade. But after we taught the Falcons a second lesson, this time in Atlanta and then ran past the 49ers in the Dome, even people outside New Orleans were starting to believe.

And a story line was emerging:
Team and City Ravaged by Katrina Shoot to the Top of the NFL.

What a fairy tale this was turning into! People in New Orleans were pinching themselves.

Early in the season, people seemed genuinely amazed. “These are the Saints,” callers were saying incredulously on local talk radio. “How can they keep winning like this?”

“Our biggest test of the regular season came in Week Fourteen. We were facing the Cowboys in Dallas, and interest was high.

When the schedule came out before the season, we drew one Monday night game: against Atlanta in the dramatic reopening of the Superdome. Everything else was a noon or a one p.m. start. That’s the kind of schedule you get when league officials and the networks don’t think your team will be a factor. Why squander a valuable prime-time audience on an also-ran? But as the season progressed and we kept surprising people, NBC and the NFL called a scheduling audible of their own. The Cowboys-Saints game, they decided, would be moved to Sunday night and given a national prime-time TV audience. At this point in the season, the Chicago Bears were looking dominant. But right behind them in the battle for high play-off seeds were the Cowboys and the Saints.

Still, most of the commentators agreed: We were going to get slammed in Dallas. The Cowboys were the stronger team. They’d had four years of molding by Bill Parcells’s firm hand. The post-Katrina Saints might be a nice Cinderella story. But hadn’t the Cowboys already clobbered them in the preseason?

“Coach, your team is playing well, very well,” one reporter said to Parcells in a pregame conference call, sucking up a little, I thought. “You manhandled the Saints team earlier in the preseason. Do you agree you have many advantages this week?”

I think Bill surprised him. “Whoa! Whoa!” he said. “I think this thing matches up well. I think these teams are even.”

Now, I’d spent enough time in the Northeast to know that when someone from New York or New Jersey—as Parcells is—insists a contest is evenly matched, he doesn’t believe that at all. He thinks his side has the edge. He’s just saying it’s even so that when he wins, his victory will be that much sweeter.

“You have to understand the mind-set,” I told our players in one of our final meetings before the game. “He doesn’t give us much chance. Let’s prove him wrong.”

There’s some background you have to understand here. My second year as an assistant coach in Dallas, Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and I played a round of golf one day against Parcells and Shawn Humphries, the resident pro at the Cowboys Golf Club. As Troy and I pulled further and further ahead, Parcells got madder and madder. He really didn’t like it when Troy and I grabbed a six-pack of Coors Light tall boys for the back nine and began gloating just a little. I remember being pleased by the idea of getting under my beloved mentor’s skin.

On the Thursday before the Cowboys game, I told our players that story. And I made a promise to them: If we won Sunday night, we’d toast our victory on the plane ride back to New Orleans with ice-cold cans of Coors Light.

Technically, that’s not allowed under NFL rules. No alcohol on the team plane. But this was going to be an exception. I alerted James Nagaoka, our travel director, about my postgame intentions.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

James is absolutely the best at what he does. He’d worked with Mickey in Seattle, and he handles some amazingly complex logistics. When he says he’ll take care of something, it gets taken care of.

We played the game and beat the Cowboys handily in front of the Sunday night crowd. The Cowboys opened impressively with a seventy-seven-yard Julius Jones run. But then we just started racking up the touchdowns: a two-yard run by Mike Karney, a three-yard pass to Karney from Brees, a twenty-seven-yard pass from Brees to Jamal Jones. The Cowboys were clearly a good team, but it was one of those games in which things just kept going right for us. We made more plays than they did. In the third quarter Karney caught another touchdown pass, which we followed with a surprise onside kick. Now there was an interesting idea! We stole possession at the forty and scored two plays later when Devery Henderson caught a forty-two-yard pass and crawled into the end zone.

Evenly matched or not, we dominated the game. For me, it was a chance to coach against someone I think so much of and have so much respect for—and win.

Timing matters in a football season. The best time of the week for an NFL coach is from the moment when you win a game until you go to sleep that night. It’s not a large window, but that is your time to enjoy the victory. When you wake up the next morning, you’re off to the next project. You’re grading the tape. You’re making corrections. You may have to travel, depending on whether your next game is home or away. But right after winning a game, before you’re on to the next one—that’s the time a coach has to unwind.

James had obviously been busy. He didn’t stop with Coors Light. He also rounded up some Heinekens and some Amstel Lights, and he had all of it icing in buckets when we boarded the plane. There was only one problem: The flight from Dallas to New Orleans was only fifty-five minutes. Was that really enough to properly enjoy all this beer, especially after you subtracted time for takeoff and landing? I didn’t think so.

As we prepared to leave DFW, I went up to the cockpit to see the pilots. “Hey,” I asked, “is there any way we can make this flight a little longer?”

The pilots looked a little puzzled. “I guess,” one of them said.

“See if we can get that done,” I said. “If you can stretch it out to maybe an hour twenty, that would be awesome.”

“We gotcha,” the captain said.

Route adjustments were made. We swung down around El Paso, then swooped slowly around and back east. In an hour and fifteen minutes, we were landing at Louis Armstrong.

We finished the season 10-6, which was good enough to put us in the divisional round of the play-offs. It was only the second time that had happened in New Orleans Saints history. And this was coming the year after Katrina, when people really worried the Saints wouldn’t show up at all. As the second-seeded team, we would face the Philadelphia Eagles, who’d beaten the New York Giants in the wild-card round of the play-offs.

The Saints and the Eagles were well matched, and I’m not just saying that. Together, we had the two best offenses in the league that year. And the game stayed close most of the way. We matched Philadelphia’s seventy-five-yard touchdown pass—Jeff Garcia to former Saint Donté Stallworth—with a four-yard Reggie Bush score. And when their running back Brian Westbrook ran for two touchdowns, one a sixty-two-yarder, Deuce McAllister responded with a five-yard touchdown run that kept us in contention. His eleven-yard touchdown reception from Brees won the game, with the defense holding back a couple of fourth-quarter Philadelphia scares. The Saints recorded a franchise play-off record 435 total yards. Deuce alone rang up 143 of them, also a record. He was magnificent that night.

That bought us a ticket to Soldier Field in Chicago for the team’s first-ever NFC championship game.

Not only had we had a winning season. Not only had we made it to the play-offs as the second seed. We’d also won there—and now we were one step away from the Super Bowl. A team that was coming off a 3-13 record, a team that wasn’t expected to be a factor at all.

After the Philly game, the feeling in New Orleans bordered on shock. It wasn’t just happiness or even delirium. It was more like, “Can this really be true?”

And: “How much farther can this possibly go?”

But we had a daunting task ahead.

For dome teams playing in the postseason, the record in cold-weather outdoor stadiums is not very good. Games like the one we played that January against the number-one-seed Chicago Bears in open-air Soldier Field illustrated this vividly.

It was snowing at game time. The temperature was 28 degrees. We committed five turnovers, which killed us. Chicago kicker Robbie Gould made three field goals in the first half. With a two-yard touchdown run by Thomas Jones, the Bears pulled out to a comfortable lead.

Our guys were miserable. The cold, the wind, the snow. The players were either shivering on the sidelines or sweating on the field in their long johns.

We came within striking distance in the third quarter. Brees connected for a thirteen-yard touchdown pass to Marques Colston and an eighty-eight-yarder to Reggie Bush. But we couldn’t overcome the field conditions or the turnovers. We lost 39-14, to the environment as much as to the Bears.

Our Cinderella season was over.

We did learn a lesson from that game—an important one that eventually would serve us well: If we were ever going to bring this city to the Super Bowl, we had to find a way to play this NFC championship game at home.

Win more in the regular season. That was the answer. Ten was just a minimum. Get the home-field advantage of a number-one seed.

We needed to be the home team right up to the Super Bowl.

When we got on the plane at O’Hare International Airport, the weather was still miserable. Our flight was delayed. We sat on the tarmac for more than two hours. We got de-iced. We got delayed. We got de-iced again. Finally we took off for New Orleans.

And when we landed at one thirty a.m., fifteen thousand Saints fans were waiting outside the airport to welcome us home. Fifteen thousand people! At one thirty in the morning! To greet a team after a loss!

“Thank you,” people called out as we walked bleary-eyed through the airport to applause from this huge, unexpected crowd.

“Thank you for such a great season,” they yelled.

AS I WAS GETTING
to know New Orleans, something occurred to me about playing here: What the fans wanted most of all was effort and presence.

Wins were nice. Same as in other cities. Winning made everyone feel better, the team and the fans. But the fact that these players and I had chosen to come here when so much was in doubt—that meant an enormous amount to the people in this region—maybe even more than the final score of some game.

This outlook is a rare act of generosity from fans to a team—all but unknown in the world of professional sports. In Boston or Philly or New York—in almost any other major sports market—the fans can love you passionately, exorbitantly, unreservedly. And they will love you as long as you deliver the victories that make them feel good about themselves and their team. But string together a few losses? Blow a few important plays? Employ a strategy that flops? Even the most enthusiastic boosters will turn on you in a flash. That is just the nature of this business.

My job as a coach—and the players’ job as players—is to perform and to achieve victory. We are professionals. We are supposed to have talent. We are paid for our time. And whether it’s football, baseball, basketball or NASCAR, all these sports have concrete ways of measuring how we’ve done. What’s your win-loss record? What’s your batting average, your free-throw percentage, your pass-completion rate? Do you keep crashing your car into the wall? Fans sometimes will briefly tolerate poor personal performances on teams that are winning. “Sometimes” and “briefly” are the key words here. But if a team isn’t winning, do not expect to get very far with pleas of “Honestly, we tried hard.”

But in New Orleans, when we lost, it was nothing like the usual fan-on-coach experience. All we got was support and encouragement. Just the fact that we were open for business meant so much at this time.

We were the home team—their team—and we were home now. These people were so generous and warm and understanding—I’d never experienced anything like that before. I didn’t quite know how to respond.

And when we won, it was off the charts. After home games, I wanted to shake hands with every spectator who’d been cheering us on. And it wasn’t only me. Lots of the players hung around every game accepting congratulations, signing autographs, posing for photos, trading high fives with the fans. The atmosphere in the Dome wasn’t like that of a pro team at all. It was more like college players coming over to the student section after a win—and joining the glee club in a rousing rendition of the school’s fight song.