Free Home Team by Sean Payton Page A

here,” he said. “I’m gonna hand this packet to your coaches.”
    I looked and didn’t say anything.
    He went through the mileage restrictions, the return policy and about a hundred other rules and regulations. At some point, I stopped listening to him. It just rubbed me the wrong way. He finished and left. I closed the door and looked around the room. “Pay no attention to what he just said,” I told the coaches. I went down to see Mickey right away.
    “This is not a time for a lot of stupid technicalities,” I said. “If a guy wants to live on the Northshore, he shouldn’t have to worry about how many miles he’s putting on his car. We need to look closely at the company policy on relocation. If a coach has to be in the hotel for more than two months—well, these aren’t normal circumstances. Can you please tell our car guy, no more surprise visits?”
    We had our first full team meeting on March 15. We were going to address our off-season conditioning program. It was one of the most important meetings we were going to have, my first team meeting ever as a head coach. Before the meeting, the players were gathering in the locker room. I’ll never forget walking into that meeting and introducing the coaches. I felt like I was standing in front of the Sweathogs from Welcome Back, Kotter . Guys slouched in their chairs, looking off in all directions, making comments under their breath. The demeanor of the team was just awful. Revealing too. There was a left tackle named Wayne Gandy. Wayne was one of the leaders in the offensive line, thirty-five years old, in the late stages of his career. And he had a La-Z-Boy recliner near his locker. Pretty soon, I was asking Dan Simmons—our head equipment manager who everyone calls Chief and has been in the organization the longest, longer than Mr. Benson or anybody else—“Whose is that?”
    “It’s Wayne Gandy’s,” Chief said.
    “Do me a favor,” I told him. “Can we have that removed, and just let Wayne know he can pick it up out on the loading dock?”
    And the chair was gone.
    I was going to address everything that could have anything to do with us winning or losing, and that included more than the offensive playbook and our red-zone defense. We’d already established that Katrina was not going to be a reason that we failed. Neither was lack of discipline. That was an important lesson I took from Parcells: You have to establish law and order right from the start. So we began in the locker room.
    That was a couple days before St. Patrick’s Day. New Orleans is a very Catholic city. St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal. And we had several Irish-Catholics on the first-year coaching staff, besides me. We figured this was as good a time as any to go out and blow off some steam.
    That first year, besides his football duties, special teams coordinator John Bonamego was also our food and beverage director. John put together a St. Patrick’s itinerary for us.
    St. Patty’s Day fell on a Friday. We finished work and a limo bus picked everyone up at the Hilton. We had dinner at Chartres House Café and then walked over to Pat O’Brien’s for some hurricanes and cigars. We were definitely ready.
    Need more proof New Orleans was still struggling? It was St. Patrick’s Day, and Pat O’Brien’s was only one-third full. The city was just barely getting off the mat. We’re in Pat O’s, for Christ’s sake! In the piano bar with the dueling piano players! It’s St. Patty’s Day! And we had no trouble finding seats, sixteen of them together! We had a long table right by one of the pianos. The coaches were dropping bills in an otherwise empty tip jar. They were calling out requests for “American Pie” and their college fight songs. Nobody had any idea who these obnoxious people were.
    Part of the oddness of the room might have been because Eddie Gabriel was gone. When I visited the bar on my occasional trips to New Orleans, I was totally charmed by Eddie. They