Payton: It’s all about details
Coach has reputation of being successful because of his exacting standards
As the New Orleans Saints boarded their team buses on Jan. 4, 2014, for a road playoff game in Philadelphia, many of them got a good laugh.
Their head coach, Sean Payton, had giant bullseyes attached to the side of each of the five charters, anticipating that Eagles fans would have projectiles at the ready.
He, like the Philadelphia faithful throwing eggs, was right on the money.
“I told them, ‘When we pull off this highway here and you head down past the stadium, on the right side, Bus 1, you’re going to take six eggs,’” Payton told The Herd recently. “As sure as we’re sitting here. These little kids will be flipping you the bird. Bus 2, you’re going to take three or four and they’re going to reload, Bus 3, you’re going to get another six. You’re just preparing your team for the events of the day.”
Payton had a good reconnaissance on the City of Brotherly Love because he lived in Pennsylvania for several years growing up and then was the Eagles’ quarterbacks coach for two years in the late 1990s. But the head coach certainly wasn’t above putting his thumb on the scale in order to ensure his version of events played out. What better way to get fans to target your buses than to put actual targets on them?
“I wanted to plant people to throw eggs at our buses because you could turn and say, ‘everything is going according to plan. It’s going just how I told you it would go,’” he said.
This is hardly a one-off. In fact, those who have worked and played for the new Denver Broncos head coach said this is just part of the Payton Show.
“When he gets up in front of the room and tells you what the
game plan is for that week and how you’re going to beat the opponent in front of you that week, you believe every single word,” former linebacker Scott Shanle told The Post. “And it’s crazy the way he stands in front of you and it plays out the way he says it’s going to, you’re like, ‘Man, how can this guy see the future?’ He knows what you need to do exactly and then it plays out that way.
“He just has a way of motivating guys.”
Sometimes that involves props. “He hung mousetraps from the ceiling one time when we had a big game coming up and he said, ‘Don’t take the cheese. The media’s going to be dangling cheese in front of you, don’t take the cheese,'” Shanle said. “Or old guys, he’d put gas cans in their lockers late in the season and ask, ‘Do you have any gas left in the tank? Are you too old?’ “
It’s part of the reason Payton impressed Broncos CEO Greg Penner and the rest of Denver’s search committee. Not specifically the bullseye or gas cans or the fact that he once protested the size of the towels given out to Saints fans because they were so small — “‘You have to dip it in water to wave the towel correctly,” Payton recalled — but rather what noticing and then taking control of that minutiae represents.
“You don’t do that without incredible passion and intensity,” Penner said in introducing Payton. “As I called around and talked to others around the league, it kept coming up. It’s the attention to detail. …
“That level of attention to detail is what makes for winning organizations. He’s going to bring that energy and passion to every part of our building.”