For people who didn’t suffer through the first 21 years of the New Orleans Saints football team or endure Hurricane Katrina, it is almost impossible to imagine the distress caused by seeing head coach Sean Payton retire.
Although coach Jim Mora made the Saints an occasional winner beginning back in 1987, and although the Saints finally won a playoff game (after 34 years) in 2000 under coach Jim Haslett, Saints fans still felt habitually woebegone until Payton arrived on the scene in Katrina’s wake.
The Saints already had a legendarily close tie to their city and region, one forged through years as a perpetual underdog in an already small market whose anchor city population was shrinking and beset by social woes. Then, of course, Katrina left 80% of the city underwater for days and about a fourth of it uninhabitable for years to come. The Saints had to play home games elsewhere, and owner Tom Benson briefly flirted with a permanent move while the team fell to a 3-13 record.
But Saints stars such as Deuce McAllister and Joe Horn publicly insisted the Saints should return to New Orleans, and Benson recommitted.
Then came Payton.
Rumored to be a coaching wunderkind, brash and intense and infectiously upbeat, Payton was just the tonic the city and team needed. He convinced the Saints to make a splash by signing badly injured quarterback Drew Brees and drafting Heisman Trophy-winning running back Reggie Bush, but other than that, the team’s draft and free agent signings were rather unheralded.
Looks deceived. Even as the city still struggled a full year after the hurricane, Payton and Brees engineered a remarkable turnaround, leading the team all the way to the NFC championship game in their very first year. The Saints were, undisputedly, the major rallying point for the whole storm-struck region, providing a reason for social cohesion, hope, and celebration amid destruction and desolation.
And Payton? He didn’t just instill a winning culture that lasted year after year — he did so with a panache and a jaw-jutting indomitability that came to symbolize the city’s resilience.
Of course, Payton and Brees finally brought a Super Bowl title to New Orleans in 2010, with Payton turning the game’s momentum around with what might be the most famous surprise gamble in title game history: a successful onside kick to begin the second half. In a town known for gambling, this was the ultimate dice roll, and it worked like a voodoo charm.
Numerous winning seasons followed, though marred by repeated, almost indescribable playoff bad luck, bad officiating, and heartbreak. But Payton cemented his place in the hearts of Saints fans when, after being wooed elsewhere in early 2016, he held a press conference announcing he would stay.
“Someone said this to me when I moved here in 2006: ‘There is something about this city,’” Payton said. “You hear that initially and, look, there was a lot back then that was uniquely different because of post-Katrina, but there is something unique and different, and I can’t put my finger on it. I mean, I drive through a pothole every day like you guys do and get upset. When the water is down in a certain parish, I have to come here to shower just like everyone else might go somewhere else, and yet, it grows on you, and it is home.”
Yet now, burnt out after a stupendously difficult season, Payton is “retiring,” at least for a year.
Forgive Saints fans for thinking it’s the end of the world as they know it, and they certainly don’t feel fine.
Editor’s note: Hillyer’s family has held Saints season tickets since the franchise began, and Hillyer began his career as a sportswriter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
