The buses were scheduled to leave the Intercontinental at ten a.m. Arrival time at Sun Life Stadium was ten forty. And five of our players didn’t make the bus. There was some question, I guess, about whether I’d told them they could drive themselves. That really wasn’t what I had said. Whatever. When the rest of us arrived at the stadium, five guys weren’t there—Tracy Porter, Bobby McCray, Roman Harper, Usama Young and Jermon Bushrod. Fred McAfee, our player programs director, was on his cell phone, looking pained. The position coaches were also on their cell phones, trying to track their guys down.
This was the perfect time for a crisis, Bill Parcells-style. It was early in the week. What the players had done really wasn’t that big a deal. Monday was the night they were supposed to go drinking. Tuesday was just Media Day. It was all unimportant. Who cares what time Media Day activities are supposed to begin? Believe me, the media will wait. And one by one, the five missing players began to show up. This was going to be a teaching moment. Teaching by confrontation.
“Coach, the league’s ready,” one of the staff people announced.
“They’ll wait,” I said. “We’re not ready yet. We’re still one player short.”
By now, Greg Bensel, the PR guy, was getting pretty agitated. Greg Aiello and the other public relations people from the NFL were leaning on him. The reporters were waiting too. The Saints were late. We were still in the locker room. I don’t know if everyone knew it yet. But we were going to have a little emergency meeting just as soon as the last straggler arrived. It was Tracy Porter. Finally he appeared in the locker room.
All the doors were closed. I began to speak.
“You guys,” I said, starting softly. “You guys remind me of a team that’s just happy to be here.”
A few players glanced at one another. No one said anything.
I continued. “There’s a lot of things I don’t do well,” I said. “But I have very good intuition. It’s gotten me to this point in my career. Part of that is developed. Part of it’s innate. But I can, and I do, pay attention. And I have a good sense of what is going on here.”
I stopped a moment to let that sink in.
“My intuition tells me you guys are in for a rude awakening this coming weekend. I can smell an ass-kickin’ on the way. I can smell a team that looks like they’re just happy to be in the Super Bowl. You guys reek of that team.”
I could hear my voice getting more intense as I was speaking. I wasn’t shouting, but I was personal and direct. I called out a few players by name. I said, “Hell, the secondary—three of the four DB’s—can’t make the bus on time. Do you honestly think Pierre Garçon and fuckin’ Dallas Clark and these other guys from the Colts are out to the wee hours? Late for Media Day? You’re late. You’re fuckin’ clueless. You got no idea.”
It wasn’t that I was yelling. I don’t believe I ever yelled. But mostly, I was just talking to them condescendingly. There was the smallest hint of disdain in my voice. We were now half an hour late for Media Day. Everyone was waiting. The doors were still closed.
I got on the coaches too. That happy-to-be-here attitude was contagious, I said. Too many people were congratulating one another already. We hadn’t done anything here to be proud of yet. I had noticed a certain giddiness on the bus rides and in the hotel lobby. “Let me know if you’re gonna party all week, because I’ll go drink red wine at the Prime too,” I said. “We’re not gonna get vested in a game plan if this is the way we’re gonna go. Ah, hell, I’ll go get fucked-up with the rest of you. Is that what we’re here for?”
I went on like that a little longer. I think they got my point.
“Before I finish talking,” I told them, “I have something else I want to add. I asked Bill Parcells to speak to you guys. You know he means a lot to me. He’s a smart guy, and you’ve heard me talk about him. He’s not in a position to speak to this team. He had a message that I was going to give you on Saturday, but I’m going to give it to you today.”
Bill’s message wasn’t something he dreamed up alone. It dates back decades before him. It sounds to me like pure Vince Lombardi, but it probably goes back even further than that. I told the players: “Here’s what Bill Parcells said. He said, ‘When the band stops playing and the crowd stops cheering—when people stop paying to come—and it’s quiet and all you’re left with is yourself, you’ve gotta be able to answer the question ‘Did I do my best? Did I do everything fuckin’ possible to win this game?’ ”
I let it hang there for a second.
“And that’s not all he said,” I continued. “He said, ‘I’ve won two Super Bowls, and I’ve lost one. There are moments in that loss that taught me more than all the great memories of the two wins.’ ”
That loss was January 26, 1997, Super Bowl XXXI. Parcells’s New England Patriots played the Green Bay Packers in the Louisiana Superdome. “Bill told me this. He said, ‘I had replaced one of the special teams players at L3 because of an injury. I had to put someone else in. And just when we had the momentum back in that game—we’d cut their lead to 27-21—Desmond Howard returned a kickoff ninety-nine yards for a touchdown and—wouldn’t you know it?—the guy I debated on whether I should be putting in at the L3 was the guy that couldn’t make the play. Now that fuckin’ haunts me forever, because we had just gotten momentum back.’”
All the successes he’d had, and Bill Parcells couldn’t forget the one Super Bowl he’d lost.
“Parcells told me, ‘So my message to you and your players is this: You’ll live with this for the rest of your life. And so when the band stops playing, when the people stop cheering, when the questions and reporters and all those other things subside, and you’re alone, quiet, and all you have are your thoughts—you’ve gotta be able to answer this question: ‘Did I do my best?’ ”
From the looks on the faces in the Sun Life Stadium locker room, what I had to say and Parcells had to say—all of it had been heard.
“I didn’t plan to give you this until Saturday,” I told the players. “But he wanted you to hear it. And you know what? It’s appropriate you hear it fuckin’ today.”
At this point, none of the players said anything. I’m not sure some of them were breathing.
When I finished, Drew Brees wanted to talk to the team, which seemed right to me. Drew said, “Hey, everyone else clear out. I want to talk to the players.” So they had their own minimizing. Only then did we do the Media Day interviews.
When we went to work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, everyone was very focused. No one was just happy to be there.
Rather than holding a phony meeting on Tuesday, the players gave me the perfect opportunity to create a crisis. They delivered it to me in a golden wrapper. The crisis was,
We’re not ready, and the team we’re playing is doing everything in its power to be ready.
It created a sense of urgency with the coaches and the players even before we began the workweek.
32
TOUGH GOING
THE COLTS WERE A
five- or six-point favorite in Super Bowl XLIV, although that spread had jumped around a bit. Most of the media, even in New Orleans, considered us the underdogs. What could be better than that? Going into the Super Bowl when most people are convinced your opponent is stronger? That environment suits me. All the pressure is on the other team.
On paper, the teams didn’t look very far apart. We’d both had long undefeated runs in the regular season. We ended up 13-3. The Colts finished 14-2. Both teams had won their respective divisions. For the first time in sixteen years, both teams were number one seeds.
Our offense had led the NFL in scoring with just under thirty-two points a game. Our quarterback was the NFL’s top-rated, completing nearly 71 percent of his passes. But the Colts had some advantages too. Their season had ended a little more cheerily than ours had. They lost at the end only when they rested their starters. We’d lost a couple we’d really tried to win. Peyton Manning, their quarterback, had thrown for forty-five hundred yards and thirty-three touchdowns during the season, making him the NFL MVP for a record fourth time. And there was a difference in Super Bowl experience. This was their second Super Bowl appearance in four seasons, our first in forty-three years.
Sunday was a beautiful night at Sun Life Stadium in Miami. Sixty degrees, maybe just a bit cooler. No chance of rain. Very little wind. If you were sitting on our bench, the slight breeze was blowing from left to right. If someone had said, “Dial up the weather for the Super Bowl,” this is what you would have ordered. It was just perfect.
That could not be said about the way the game began for us. We won the toss and chose to receive. The Colts kicked off. This being an even-numbered year, the Colts, as the AFC representative, were the official home team, but that meant nothing, of course. Except for this:
uniform colors
. In the stands, I saw far more Saints jerseys than Colts jerseys. From the perspective of our bench, we were playing right to left, into whatever breeze there was.
We had spent a long time planning our first fifteen plays. We call them “our openers.” Some weeks we’d go through those plays, and we’d be rolling. We’d score on the first drive. We had been one of the most successful teams in the league on opening possessions. We were first or second in the NFL in first-drive scoring. We went through the first seven weeks of the season scoring on our first possession in every case—a touchdown or at least a field goal.
But this time, we went three and out. So much for openers. We ran Pierre Thomas. We threw a short pass to Pierre that brought up a third and two. We had talked the night before and all agreed: The very first third down we had, we would take a shot deep. We’d given this a lot of thought. Indianapolis was really a big zone team. They play a lot of soft-zone cover two or cover three. They’re a hard team to get the ball behind. They hadn’t given up many big plays all season. We knew we’d have to earn what we could underneath the coverage. They would force us to execute seven- or eight-play drives. They weren’t giving up a cheap or a long touchdown. They were very well coached, and that was their scheme. But on third down, like so many teams, they used a bit more man-to-man. We saw a little opportunity to take a shot.
So that first third down, Drew threw long. We got the man-to-man coverage we were looking for. But they played it well. Robert Meachem was outside to our right, Devery Henderson to our left and Marques Colston to the inside. Drew threw to Meachem, but the pass was incomplete. It was close. And, hey, we backed them up a bit. But that’s what happened. So we punted.
The Colts answered with a quick fifty-three-yard drive and a thirty-eight-yard Matt Stover field goal.
Ugh.
At forty-two years old, Stover became the oldest person ever to play in a Super Bowl. Colts up, 3-0.
Courtney Roby almost fumbled our kickoff return near the twenty-five, but he was ruled down by contact. Lucked out on that one. Brees passed to Reggie Bush for sixteen yards and a first down. But the drive didn’t go much farther, and we were forced to punt. Thomas Morstead’s kick left the Colts with tough field position at their own four-yard line.
No problem for Manning and the first-quarter Colts. Joseph Addai’s three rushes totaled fifty-three yards. Manning’s three completions included a nineteen-yarder to Pierre Garçon for a touchdown. The ninety-six-yard drive was a Super Bowl record.
First-quarter momentum? Solidly with the Colts.
When you start any game, obviously you say: “Gosh, we need to get off to a good start.” This wasn’t the start we wanted.
The Colts’ offense was on the field far longer than ours was. They were converting their third downs, and we weren’t converting ours. Jim Caldwell was coaching steady. Manning had been like a machine. We were down 10-0. But we had a game plan. And nowhere in our game plan were the words “Saints fold.”
When the second quarter began, we changed directions—left to right now. And we started to get a little momentum going. We weren’t scoring touchdowns yet. But it seemed like things might be shifting our way a bit.
Our next drive, which had started late in the first quarter, looked a little more promising. Brees connected on four passes for thirty-six yards, getting as far as the Colts’ twenty-two. But on third down, he was thrown for a seven-yard loss by Dwight Freeney. The supposedly ailing Freeney, who’d been nursing an injured ankle, hit our line like a sledgehammer through Chinese drywall. His one-handed sack was better proof of his health than any X-ray. We settled for a forty-six-yard Garrett Hartley field goal and were damned happy to have it. It was something on the board at least. In the final two minutes of the half, we drove to first and goal on the Colts’ three. A touchdown would have tied things up. But the run on third didn’t get us far enough. Instead of kicking a field goal, I thought we should go for it.
I called one of those check-with-me plays. You run or pass, depending on the defense. They expected a pass. Drew got us to the run, but we didn’t gain the yards we needed and didn’t score. The only good news was where the Colts got the ball. Their own one-yard line. We held them. They punted, and we inched our way back into field goal range. Hartley hit from forty-four as time ran out. What a run our young kicker was having.
I knew that second Hartley field goal also got me off the hook. People were already second-guessing my decision two minutes earlier to go for it on fourth. Getting the field goal now was some consolation. I still think it was the right call. What you didn’t want to do so late in the half was kick off to the Colts, let them have the ball on the twenty and put Peyton Manning in a two-minute drill. The way the game was unfolding, that sounded like trouble to me.
Halftime score: 10-6 Colts.
This was not our finest thirty minutes of football. We were not where I had hoped to be. But we were not out of it at all. Our second-quarter momentum was a whole lot better than our first. Our time of possession was improving. We were starting to move the ball. We were playing better overall. And we were only down by four. It’s not like the Saints had never come from behind before. Four points down at the half? That was almost a tie game to us.