PAYTON PLACE
Antsy Saints looking to knock the crown off the Eagles
Sean Payton used a colourful technique to motivate his players this week.
Accompanied by four armed guards, the New Orleans Saints head coach wheeled the Lombardi Trophy on top of $225,000 in cold, hard cash into the team’s dressing room.
“Y’all want this?” Payton said to the Saints. “Win three (effin) games.”
Their run at the Super Bowl trophy and the 225 grand in bonus money that comes with it begins today at MercedesBenz Superdome when the Saints host the defending champion Philadelphia
Eagles in the last of the weekend’s divisional round matches.
Like the Los Angeles Rams, the Saints went 13-3 this season to improve their record to 24-8 over the last two years. Unlike the Rams, who are led by 24-year-old quarterback Jared Goff, the window for the Saints is closing. Quarterback Drew Brees had another phenomenal season, setting an NFL record with a 74.4-percent completion rate, but he turns 40 on Tuesday.
At some point he’s going to slow down.
The Saints could have represented the NFC and even won the Lombardi Trophy a year ago, but victory in the divisional round matchup with the Vikings was snatched away by the Minneapolis Miracle. Losing to the Eagles would put their playoff record at 1-2 during since last winter. It would be a blown opportunity of tremendous proportions.
Knowing this might be why Payton sounded a little bit on edge Friday in his last media availability of the week.
Asked why new pictures have been put up in the Saints’ locker-room and why he “changed some things,” Payton snapped back: “What’s in there is our team’s business and not yours.”
Asked why he kept his foot on the gas in a 48-7 victory over the Eagles at the Superdome in November — an embarrassment Eagles players have talked about as putting extra fuel in their tank ever since they defeated the Bears in last week’s wild card game — Payton denied that was the case in a rather snarky manner.
“Listen, if you pay attention to the film and watch the film, it was one of those games where you’re playing a real good offence and late in the game we score a touchdown,” said Payton. “But we were 30-something at that point. We played well.”
Asked about it providing the Eagles with extra motivation, Payton replied: “It’s a divisional playoff game. My question would be, we’re all playing hard in these divisional playoff games, right? Are you going to play harder? All right, next good question.”
The late touchdown was a pass to Alvin Kamara, who beat Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins on the play. Jenkins, a former Saint, looked over at the Saints bench and flipped Payton the finger.
Jenkins said afterward that there are no hard feelings, that both he and Payton are “very competitive” people and they talked afterward. The two love each other. Everything is cool.
“He’s a special player to me,” Payton said Friday of Jenkins, considered a strong leader even before he signed with the Eagles as a free agent. “He had a big part of what we accomplished in his rookie year ... a guy that really, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have let out of the building.”
Meanwhile, Payton also has a good relationship with Eagles head coach Doug Pederson. The two go back to 1999, when Payton was an assistant coach on Andy Reid’s staff and Pederson was brought in as a backup QB to help with the development of Donovan McNabb.
“I consider him a real good friend now, in the last yearand-a-half,” said Payton. “We’ve had a chance to play some golf, and I think what he’s done (coaching the Eagles) has been fantastic. I grew up in Philadelphia and can remember all those Eagles teams, and when you’re the first to win a Super Bowl for a city like that, that’s pretty special.”
Indeed, Pederson is having as good a start to a head coaching career as possible. Not so much the 29-19 record the Eagles have in the regular season under him, but the 4-0 playoff mark that includes a Super Bowl victory.
His quarterback for all four of those victories was Nick Foles, who has deep-rooted ties to Brees.
The two Super Bowl MVPs attended the same small high school (Westlake) in Austin, Texas, with Brees leading the football team to a 28-0-1 record in two years and its only state championship in 1996. Exactly a decade later, Foles was Westlake’s starter. In two years, he broke some Brees’ records and brought the team to a second appearance in the state championship game.
Today, they face each other in NFL post-season play for the first time.
“Funny how things play out,” Brees recently told reporters. “But he’s done a phenomenal job.”
For the Pederson-Foles run to continue, the Eagles’ defence needs to step up. It did a good job in last week’s victory over the Bears. But Mitch Trubisky is not Brees.
“We have to be better on third down, which means we have to do a good job on first and second downs,” Jenkins told reporters Friday, referring to the 41-point loss at the Superdome. “That’s going to be a huge key for us, getting off the field on third downs and then limiting their big plays. They’ve got a diverse offence. Drew can obviously dissect any defence and dictate. We have to find a way to disrupt him, take him out of his comfort zone. That didn’t happen last time.”
The last time, said linebacker Nigel Bradham, “everything they did worked and nothing we did worked.”
Champions generally don’t relinquish their crowns easily. Don’t expect the Eagles to. It took them too long to get their first.
“Our confidence level is high,” said Bradham. “We’re playing some of our best ball at the right time. That’s important. That’s what this tournament is all about, playing your best football at this time, peaking when you need to peak.”