Sean Payton is the winningest coach in New Orleans Saints history, admittedly at the top of a mediocre field.
But he’s also the only coach to get the former Aints anywhere near a Super Bowl, let alone win one.
He’s the only coach who got the Who Dat fan base expecting to be in the playoffs every year as opposed to occasionally daydreaming about a wild card.
He’s well respected in football circles.
Still, anybody can wear out their welcome.
The best of them can get stale.
Sometimes a team just needs to hear a different voice.
That may have been the case this year with LSU — it wasn’t at the close of 2015 even if the administration hadn’t botched the coup attempt so badly — but it’s becoming more and more evident that it was time for the Tigers to move on from Les Miles no matter how entertaining his quirks were.
Payton does seem to have lost some of his magic, too.
It’s hard to squint toward the light at the end of the tunnel when the Saints finish a third consecutive season at 7-9.
It’s hard to get optimistic about next year when the final game of that third straight losing season was an eyesore of a much-worse-than-the-final-score loss to the hated Atlanta Falcons, even if the final was a mere 38-32.
How much longer do they expect to waste the talents and leadership of one of the best quarterbacks of all time, Drew Brees I think his name is?
The unthinkable whispers began early in the season, reluctantly at first, but gaining steam.
The question was this: Should the Saints get rid of or let Payton go and both of them move on?
Let us take a deep breath before we answer.
OK, you ready?
Here we go.
In a word … No. Like, N-O. Use capital letters — NO. Like the abbreviation for the city. Big, fat NO.
I can’t imagine the Saints without Drew Brees, but I also can’t imagine him conferring on the sideline with anybody but Payton.
If the Saints go 7-9 again next year, then maybe have this conversation.
But not now.
It’s hard to imagine Brees without Payton. They’re Butch and Sundance in black and gold and fleur de lis.
Brees is apparently going to play — and play at a high level — until he qualifies for Social Security.
Who knows if he’d have the same chemistry with another head coach?
So it would appear that the Saints avoided one major crisis when Payton told a radio station Monday night that he planned to not only be back with the Saints next season, but that he planned to honor the final four years of his contract.
It’s still open to a thorough semantics investigation, and will no doubt be drug through the wringer of being “open to interpretation.”
You note that he said “my plan is definitely to be back here.”
Astute radio host Bobby Hebert perhaps picked up on that when he followed up with: “Can you say that you have no interest coaching any other team than the Saints in 2017?”
Payton: “Yeah, absolutely.”
So there’s not a lot of wiggle room there, although nothing seems to be definite in coaching rumors these days.
But that was certainly more definitive than Payton’s answer to basically the same question earlier in the day, which was “Next question …”
Reports had persisted that Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis was open to trade talks for Payton. Yes, NFL coaches can, and have been, traded to other teams, usually for spare change and draft picks.
But Loomis, who would be negotiating for and investing the draft picks, seems to be a lot more of the problem than Payton.
Presumably he’d also be leading the next coaching search.
If it worked out like most of the free agent signings and more than few of the draft picks, it’s not likely there would be much of an upgrade at head coach.
This year the Saints began the season awful — 0-3 — and finished with perhaps the worst performance of the season (forget the deceiving final score).
But, in between, there was some real progress.
You wouldn’t know it by the Falcons finale, but from midseason on, the Saints seemed to be on to something, particularly with the defense.
As helpless as it looked again the Falcons, you’d like to see what boyish defensive coordinator Dennis Allen can do with another year, hopefully one without a secondary decimated by injuries.
This year, for the first time in ages, the Saints have some cap room to play with on the free agency market.
See what Allen can do with a full deck. He certainly didn’t have it this season.
And you must give Payton credit that, no matter their weaknesses and frustrations, he seemed to get an honest effort out of this team. Maybe their best game was the last home game, 31-24 over the Bucs, just minutes after they’d learned they were officially eliminated from the playoffs.
So it wasn’t for lack of want-to that they finished 7-9. It appeared they had a good locker room, some chemistry with the right kind of guys. Getting that might be the toughest part of coaching.
But, mainly, I don’t think it’s time for Payton to go because he still seems to have plenty of fire on the sideline. He’s not just collecting a big paycheck, hasn’t gotten comfortable or burnt out on the job.
Hopefully, he isn’t trade bait.
l
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU
athletics. Email him at
shobbs@americanpress.com
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