Free Home Team by Sean Payton

return it on Monday.
    That was how the whole visit went. Like quicksand. Every time I wiggled, I’d sink farther down. We were hanging on here, and I mean that. It was tough.
    And the kids weren’t exactly having a blast. Meghan had strep throat. I asked our medical staff to call in a prescription for antibiotics to CVS. The store on Airline Drive is about three miles from the Airport Hilton. Airline Drive isn’t the place you’d want your family to get their impression of New Orleans. It’s the old highway to Baton Rouge. There’s nothing appealing about it at all. There are really only two or three decent buildings on that part of the road besides the Saints facility: Cox Cable, the local Budweiser headquarters, St. Martin’s School.
    I left the hotel about six p.m. to pick up Meghan’s medication. It’s about a ten-minute drive. I got to the drugstore. There was a line. About forty-five minutes later, Beth was on the cell phone.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “I’m in line,” I said.
    One person behind the counter was trying to fill prescriptions. I don’t know what the problem was. But I was getting impatient. This was just a couple of months after my hiring. I could stand in a line or be anywhere publicly and not be recognized. The line was hardly moving at all.
    My wife called a second time. “What’s taking so long?” And a third time. “Sean, you’re kidding me.” Beth called a total of four times.
    When I finally got to the counter, the woman could give me only half the prescription. They’re out of it. They’re limited. They’re rationing. I don’t know what the problem was. All I knew was I was at the CVS. Beth was at the hotel with our sick child. The necklace was in its box to go back to the jeweler. We were in a city where the pharmacies didn’t function. And I’d been told no by four or five different coaches in the last couple weeks. I stood in line for that amoxicillin for two hours and ten minutes.
    “Sean, where are you bringing us?” Beth asked when I finally got back to the hotel.

9
    SETTLING IN
    WE HAD TO PUT a calendar together for the team. It was the first calendar I’d ever done. You have to lay it all out. I thought about what Parcells did when he came to Dallas. When’s your first team meeting? When does your off-season program begin? What does the league schedule say?
    All of this gets filed with the league office back in New York.
    Periodically, players would come into the office. Some players weren’t in town, but we spoke to everybody. We told ourselves, “We’re gonna look at them all as equals. We’re gonna play the best players. We’re gonna go by what we see.” We knew we had to make some decisions in regard to free agency. We were going to lose our starting center, LeCharles Bentley. We were moving on from Aaron Brooks, the quarterback: “Call him and tell him we’re gonna waive him.” There were others we would have to waive as well.
    There was a divide in the building that was important to understand. When a coaching staff gets fired, the coach and his assistants all go away. But the marketing guy, the tickets guy, the PR guy—these people remain. They’ve seen lots of coaches come and go. There’s always a load of blame that goes out the door.
    To his credit, Mr. Benson knew there was a cavity that needed to be filled, an unhealthy vibe, a bridge that needed to be built. He had mentioned this in my initial interview. And the problem was caused by both sides, not just one. So in the same way we were evaluating the players, we were evaluating everyone—from who’s cooking the meals on up. A to Z, we were evaluating. Do they have the passion? Are they just punching the clock? Everyone came under scrutiny.
    Two months into the job, our coaching staff was pretty much complete. We were in a personnel meeting when one of the Saints executives poked his head into the room. “Coach, I just want to bring you some information on the car program