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FROM THE TIME WE
got here in 2006, we had closely studied the success of the New England Patriots. That’s not so hard to understand. If you were taking over a failing business, you would want to look closely at the practices of the successful companies in the same industry, especially those competitors who were at the top.

New England was clearly a team we could learn some lessons from. In Tom Brady, they had one of the top quarterbacks, maybe
the
top quarterback. They had Bill Belichick as their coach, who is certainly at the top of our game. So we paid a lot of attention to Patriots personnel decisions and how they built a team with character. “What’s their recipe?” I was constantly asking myself. “How are they doing what they do so well?”

I had never really spent much time with Belichick until the Pro Bowl in early ’07. The coaching staff whose team loses the NFC championship game coaches at the Pro Bowl against the coaching staff whose team lost the AFC game. That would be my crew and Belichick’s. We had lost to the Bears. They had lost to the Colts.

Bill and his staff had a tremendous amount to teach a young, first-year head coach. I asked questions: “How would you handle that?” I got their impressions of people in the league. Over five or six days, we just spent some comfortable time together. Bill and I laughed about stuff. Beth and I had Meghan and Connor with us in the hotel, and our suite being directly above his, I cringed at the thought of Meghan and Connor bouncing off the beds and rarin’ to go while Bill was reviewing game tape or trying to sleep in. I told him I wished he was in 332-33 and we were in 232-33. We chartered three fishing boats one afternoon and the Patriots’ coaches and the Saints’ coaches went out deep-sea fishing. Just being able to have a Corona and talk with a guy like Belichick, that was invaluable to me.

It also gave me a chance to develop my Bill Belichick impression. Let me tell you, I do a great Belichick.

So yes, in our industry, this is a guy you would want to study closely. And all of a sudden, three years later, we’re playing his team in a big Monday night game—a significant game for more than just the record.

More than just a win or a loss, it was really a game of credibility in our unbeaten season at that point. We were 10-0 when we played the Patriots. And yet the experts were saying, “Well, we’ll see how good they are this weekend.” We had a few players on our team at this point from New England’s roster. Randall Gay and Heath Evans, we acquired as free agents. We traded for David Thomas. Some of these key pieces to our roster were players who had experienced the teamwork, the work ethic, the winning culture, the whole Belichick package of the New England Patriots.

They had a good feel for how Bill Belichick coached. I remember asking Randall, “How would he handle this?” And we’d spent time with Bill, and now we were getting ready to play against him.

I knew I could go into the team meeting on Wednesday and point out to the players some of the things we could improve on to win. But rather than me doing that, why not have Bill Belichick come visit our team?

Why not give our team the chance to hear what Bill Belichick would be telling the Patriots that very morning? I could stand up there and criticize our team. But would the message be clearer if the other coach pointed out our flaws to us?

He’s the one on Monday night who would be obsessively trying to exploit them.

OK, maybe he wouldn’t agree to do that, to speak to the opposing team before a big game.

But I could certainly do it for him.

I spent some time with Randall, Heath and Dave. We talked about how Belichick would look at us. I watched some tape of Belichick interviews. I made a careful note of how he scrunched up his face and how he tilted his head. I
became
Bill Belichick. The hair greased over to the side and darkened. The blue hoodie with the New England Patriots logo. The khakis and the tennis shoes.

To get the voice right, I went on
NFL.com
Tuesday night and listened to Mike Lombardi interviewing Bill. Listened three or four times until I had that flat, tightly wound, slightly psycho-sounding monotone exactly right.

And we made a little film.

It was me as Bill Belichick, speaking to the Patriots about all the things that sucked about the New Orleans Saints. Cutting away to video of every imaginable Saints screwup.

Speaking in that trademark Belichick monotone, I opened up indicting myself.

As I—or Belichick—spoke, the B roll featured some of the Saints’ worst fumbles, most of them committed by guys sitting right there in the room.

There was Drew being creamed. And on it went.

And I went on like that, basically pointing out all these truths about our team. But it wasn’t me saying it. It was Bill. And it wasn’t just the players Bill was ripping. It was me. It was the defensive coordinator, the offensive line coach. We were all getting criticized.

These are the things that are said when the doors are closed. These are things your opponent says about you.

As I was playing the tape for our players, you know that Bill was talking to his team in Foxborough, hitting exactly all those keys.

I went on like that for a full forty minutes.

When you do something like this, you step out of the norm. You deliver a message that will connect with the team in a much deeper and more profound way.

It doesn’t always work. As a coach, sometimes you swing, and maybe you hit a foul ball or you miss. You step away from the plate, and you say, “I don’t know what I was thinking, but that wasn’t it.”

Then sometimes you make solid contact. And every once in a while, you just hit one right out of the park. That’s the truth. And this was one of those. Hit it right out of the park!

There were a few muffled laughs in the room right at the beginning. But then the video came up of us fumbling the ball. The video came up of us missing tackles. The video came up of us getting a field goal blocked. The video came up of us getting beat deep. And the video was hitting on each of these points. There were six batted-down balls from Brees. There were the turnovers, the tackling, all the things that as a coach you want to talk to your team about. And we put it together, and it was right up on the screen and Belichick talking to the Patriots team about us.

The humor lasted maybe thirty seconds. Then the room was quiet. Dead quiet.

Because truly, we were being criticized here in a roundabout way—myself included. I was the first one.
“The guy hasn’t taken care of the football since he was hired in ’06. He didn’t do it at the Pro Bowl the week I was with him there. That’s coaching.”

Message delivered, I would say.

When we left that meeting, of course there were three people I wanted to see right away. I wanted to see Randall, Heath and Dave.

“How close was it?” I asked Randall Gay first.

“I got goose bumps,” he said. “I felt like he was sitting in the Patriot team meeting.”

The others agreed.

There’s an old saying: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I believe that to be true.

We wanted to be like the New England Patriots. We wanted that. No team has done it better. Coaching, quarterback, defense, teamwork—that was the team. They were the champions as far as I was concerned. And on
Monday Night Football
, the Saints are coming into the Superdome 10-0. People are saying our victories have been lucky. We’re not as good as our record says. Our credibility is on the line. This is who we’ve been modeling ourselves after. This is who we’ve been talking about. And some of those things Belichick or I or whoever was saying—some of those things were true. Hell, all of them were true.

We still beat his team. Solidly. It was 38-17. They were ahead in the first quarter, 7-3. But we scored another twenty-one points before the half, and the Patriots never recovered. Our defense did a great job. Brees played as well as a quarterback could play. He had a perfect passer rating, which is unheard of in a game like that. By the end of the night, we were 11-0, and something ominous was setting in.

People were looking ahead at the schedule and saying, “Washington, Atlanta, Dallas. If they can get past Dallas, the Saints really could finish 16-0.”

I hate that kind of talk.

WINNING BEATS LOSING ANY
day. We had a couple wins left in us.

We ended up in a dogfight with the Redskins. We had to make some big plays to come back. They missed a field goal late to give us a chance to send the game into overtime. We won a game we very easily could have lost, maybe even should have lost. And yet we found a way to win it. That was twelve.

We went back to Atlanta and had a close game there. We ran a fake punt. It didn’t work. Nonetheless, we were able to escape with a win against the Falcons, 26-23. Critics would say we won ugly. OK. But you take the ugly ones too.

We were tired. Mentally and physically. The pressure was building. The expectations were high. We had played that Monday night game against New England, traveled to D.C. in a short week, got their best shot, traveled to Atlanta, got their best shot. And although we won, we won two close games to get to thirteen wins.

The good news was that in Washington we had secured the NFC South championship. But a real issue was being raised: Do you rest your players? Or do you play for a perfect season? Rest and lose momentum? Or do you risk injury to finish unbeaten? It’s the risk of injury versus the achievement of finishing unbeaten. That’s really it.

The Colts at this point were also unbeaten. Bill Polian was wrestling with the same issue. Minnesota was on our heels a game behind. I talked to our players directly about this: “You guys are gonna hear a lot about whether we’re gonna play these last three games to win if we’ve already got the seeding locked up—or whether we’re gonna rest our starters. No one person is gonna make that decision. But our plan—Mickey Loomis, Sean Payton, the coaching staff, the team—we are gonna play to win ’em all.”

Clearly, the fans wanted us to play for perfection. The media too. But remember, what’s most important is winning the Super Bowl. That being said, we were gonna try to win them all.

And then we lost to Dallas in a big game on a Saturday night. This really was a big game. I made a mistake. DeMarcus Ware, their talented defensive end, was hurt all week. It was a neck injury. You know how serious those can be. All week, the talk was that he wasn’t going to play. From a protection standpoint, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have in the event that he did play. Well, he did play. And we—beginning with me—didn’t have an adequate plan from a coaching standpoint for helping Jermon Bushrod.

There were several reasons we lost the game. That was part of it. So was the perfect-season talk. Tony Dungy, the NBC commentator and retired Indianapolis coach, came out two days before that game and said the Cowboys had no chance. I just cringed when I heard him say that.

Dallas was a good team, a very good team. One of the best teams we played last year. They were very good defensively. But they were backed into a corner. It was the month of December. They had not exorcised their demons. No one gave them a chance on the road in New Orleans. It was the prefect spot for them. It was a tough spot for us, and we didn’t handle it well. We didn’t coach as well as we needed to, beginning with me. The score was 24-17, and I don’t know that the game was that close.

No more perfection. We were 13-1.

We were still playing for the one seed. Minnesota lost that weekend. So we still had that one-game lead. We didn’t have the one seed sewn up. But we were playing Tampa Bay at home, and surely we could beat Tampa Bay.

There had been a lot of pressure in the past three weeks: “Coach, you guys haven’t played as well as you did earlier in the season. And you lost to Dallas. Do you feel like you guys aren’t doing the same things you did earlier in the year?”—all that BS.

We went up 17-0 and played a great first half against Tampa Bay. We played well offensively and defensively, did all the things that had gotten us to 13-1. In the second half, it was the opposite. Credit Tampa Bay. They had a big punt return for a touchdown. We drove the length of the field late but missed a field goal. In overtime we couldn’t get the ball back or get them stopped in time. You could point to a number of things. Here’s loss number two. And here’s crisis.

Dallas hadn’t represented crisis. Dallas was another good team. The loss to Tampa represented the crisis that you’ll face in any season and ours came in Week Sixteen. Crisis. We lost to Tampa Bay. After we lost to Tampa Bay, the Minnesota Vikings lost to the Chicago Bears, which guaranteed us the one seed. So although we had lost the last two games, the New Orleans Saints had secured the one seed that weekend.

So how would we play Carolina? I had made the comment that we were going to play this game to win, and we needed to get back to basics. We needed to get back on the field and do all these things. And when the Bears beat the Vikings—this was important. That changed things. We had the one seed. We no longer had a perfect season to protect. We were going to rest our players.