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Katherine Terrell
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Jeff Legwold
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Jeff Legwold
ESPN Senior Writer
- Jeff Legwold is a senior writer who covers the Denver Broncos and the NFL at ESPN. Jeff has covered the Broncos for more than 20 years, joining ESPN in 2013. He also assists with NFL draft coverage, including his annual top 100 prospects. Jeff has been a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Board of Selectors since 1999. He has attended every scouting combine since 1987.
When Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton looks across the field at the Caesars Superdome on Thursday night, he’ll be faced with 16 years of memories as the former coach of the New Orleans Saints.
There was Steve Gleason’s blocked punt during the Saints’ first game back in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and Garrett Hartley’s kick to send the 2009 squad to the Super Bowl. Payton watched Drew Brees break records from a suite while serving a Bountygate suspension in 2012 and witnessed the “No-Call” heartbreak in the NFC Championship Game from the 2018 season.
Payton’s meticulous attention to detail, motivational tactics and domineering personality helped build a winning culture in New Orleans. He turned a franchise that had one playoff win into an offensive powerhouse, with nine postseason appearances and a Super Bowl victory.
Almost three years removed from the place where he won 152 games, Payton will be the man standing in the way of the Saints (2-4) on “Thursday Night Football” (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video) as he tries to continue to establish a culture in Denver and get the Broncos (3-3) back to the playoffs for the first time since 2015.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of flowers and warm fuzzies for yours truly, and I get it. … I can’t stand losing,” Payton said. “It’s about our team and me as the head coach of the Broncos getting ready to play on an early week and trying to play one of our better games.”
It’s the first time Payton will face the Saints and coach Dennis Allen, who coached under Payton for 12 seasons in two separate stints. The Saints traded Payton’s contract to the Broncos last year after he spent the 2022 season as an NFL analyst. New Orleans acquired the 29th pick in the 2023 draft and a 2024 second-round pick while Denver got Payton and a 2024 third-round pick.
ESPN spoke to more than a dozen players and coaches about playing for a man one player described as an “offensive savant.” They shared stories of what it was like to play for Payton’s “Game-day Sean” alter ego, how he approached the practice week and what it might look like when Payton plays his old team Thursday.
“He’s certainly a demanding coach … and he does a really good job of identifying areas of weakness that he wants to try to attack,” Allen said. “And so certainly that’ll be something we’ll have to deal with.”
PAYTON’S GLARE IS the first thing many former players recall about their coach. Players had several names for it: “the death stare,” “the look” and the “mean face,” among them.
“If you mess up, you don’t even want to look at him. You don’t even want to be in his eye distance,” said Saints tight end Juwan Johnson, who played for Payton from 2020 to 2021.
Players described Payton’s alter ego as “Game-day Sean” — alluding to the change in his personality during games.
The stories were numerous: He destroyed a fire alarm in the visiting locker room prior to a 51-14 win against the Cincinnati Bengals in 2018 because he “needed the noise to stop.” He snapped at an equipment manager for handing him the wrong stick of gum during the NFC Championship Game from the 2009 season. He once mocked Minnesota Vikings fans by doing the SKOL clap in a playoff game.
Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi, who coached for Payton from 2019 to 2021, said Payton’s former assistants recently joked about how many times he fired them during a game. One coach estimated it was at least 20 times.
“I think everyone has one of those game-day stories about him, but, to his credit, he’s got amnesia, when it’s over, it’s over,” Rizzi said. Former Saints wide receiver Lance Moore, who played for him from 2006 to 2013, said Payton’s routine used to start with Spark energy drinks. Players would guess how many he had by game time based on his level of intensity.
“We’re like, how many Sparks has Sean had today?” Moore said. “I guarantee you that was part of his game-day persona. He gets his energy drinks in and that helps him get his level of focus and intensity ready to go.”
The biting remarks come next. Moore still remembers Payton’s tirade after he dropped a pass against the Green Bay Packers in Week 2 of the 2006 season. Payton walked over and asked if the game was “too big for him.”
It was a pivotal moment in Moore’s career because he never wanted to disappoint Payton again. Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan, who played for Payton from 2011 to 2021, said “Dancin’ Lance” showed up after that, finishing ninth in career receiving yards for the franchise.
“He brings out the best of you if you can respond to the way he coaches,” Jordan said.
Some players responded by matching Payton’s intensity and yelling right back. Former Saints tight end Jimmy Graham, who played for Payton from 2010 until he was traded to the Seattle Seahawks in 2015, said they often butted heads in-game because they both cared about winning so much.
Graham and Payton got into a shouting match on the sideline of a 2014 preseason game after Graham was flagged twice for excessive celebration for dunking over the goal posts. The NFL banned dunking after Graham caused a game delay in 2013 by knocking the crossbar askew.
He said Payton told him before the game that he could dunk to “get that s— out of your system,” but by the time the game started, he’d forgotten about it. An angry Payton called him “selfish” on the sideline after the second dunk.
“He gets so into the game, that whatever he told you before, if it was something like that, he’s not going to remember,” Graham said.
Broncos rookie quarterback Bo Nix has already taken some licks after Payton barked at him on the sideline during a Week 5 win against the Las Vegas Raiders. Payton yelled at Nix for not running a play — an incomplete pass to Troy Franklin — the way Payton intended. Nix yelled back, prompting former Saints tackle Terron Armstead to write on X: “Bo just became Sean’s favorite player!”
Bo just became Sean’s favorite player! https://t.co/DswevQt6fk
— T. Stead 🎤🎧 (@T_Armstead72) October 6, 2024
And no Broncos player will forget how Payton reacted after their 70-20 loss to the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 24, 2023. They surrendered a franchise record in points and yardage total (726) — the highest point total any NFL team had given up since 1966 and the highest yardage total since 1951.
Many who were in the postgame locker room have recounted a boiling cauldron of football shame, dread, anger and embarrassment.
In a cascade of words, many profane, that rattled concrete, a volcanic Payton screamed: “This, this, this will never happen again. You understand? Ne-ver again.”
As one former Broncos player put it, “He lost his f—ing s—, like he couldn’t believe it happened … he was a part of something he couldn’t believe. I doubt he will ever be that mad at the team about anything more than that — ever. I don’t think he could see, he was so pissed, but he was letting people know if you’re going to be around, you better fix that.”
THE “GAME-DAY SEAN” personality doesn’t last beyond the competition window.
“I have the utmost respect for him as a coach, but he is a Jekyll-Hyde type of person,” Rizzi said.
Payton is calm and meticulous during the week, making sure every angle is covered. He looks for any edge he can get in the upcoming game, including figuring out tactics to motivate both the team and individual players.
He’d place gas cans by the lockers of older players to ask them if they have enough gas left to get through the season and put mouse traps around the facility as a warning to players to not “eat the cheese” — falling into the trap of believing the media hype — while on win streaks.
Graham was a favorite target, saying Payton liked to push his buttons because he knew he played well when he was “pissed.”
Payton spent a week needling Graham about how he’d fare against Arizona Cardinals safety Tyrann Mathieu in a 2013 matchup.
“Sean had some DB play me one-on-one all practice. Holding me, scratching, clawing, talking shit. … I was pissed,” Graham recalled.
Graham said he was so amped by game time that he dominated the matchup against Mathieu and the team’s top cornerback, finishing with nine catches for 134 yards. He said such tactics were “very motivating.”
“I never shied away from the moment,” Graham said. “The bigger the moment, the better I played.”
But not every player adjusts to Payton’s bluntness. Broncos defensive tackle Malcolm Roach, who spent four seasons with the Saints, said some players were surprised by their coach’s direct feedback.
“But I think the guys who succeed with him know you always have to have somebody in your corner, who’s going to tell you what you need to hear, not what they want to hear,” Roach said. “And he might think you need it a lot.”
Payton has a well-known distaste for comfort and entitlement, something that surfaced after the Broncos selected Nix with the 12th pick of the 2024 draft. Nix was not immediately named the starter. Payton believed it was “something earned” in an open competition during training camp.
“There was no way — no way — he would have named Bo the starter right after the draft,” a former Payton assistant said, “That would go against everything he believes, he would never let that young guy know that. He might think it, might believe it, might even want it and have planned for it, but he never would have told that kid right away, ‘You’re the starter.”’
When the first depth chart of the preseason was released, Nix was listed at the bottom of his position with the rest of the rookies. And Aug. 21, when Payton told Nix he would start the season opener, he called each of the team’s three quarterbacks over to him just before a practice, one at a time, to tell them of his decision.
“We didn’t have cake and candles,” he said.
Nix has appeared to respond well to Payton’s tactics. Payton said after the sideline tiff that Nix “had a little Ferris Bueller” in him, explaining Bueller was quirky and liked to do his own thing.
The quarterback referenced the moment on his Instagram and responded by calling Payton “Dennis,” a nod to the “Dennis the Menace” nickname given to Payton by his mentor Bill Parcells.
“[The arguing] that’s like a term of endearment for him,” Jordan said. “It’s one of those last remnants of that brimstone and fire-type coach. Now it’s 2024 … people get their feelings hurt quicker now.”
SAINTS PLAYERS AND coaches got used to Payton’s intense attention to detail.
He’d notice if a player was even one inch off his mark in practice.
“Sean literally walked over to [a receiver] in practice and said, ‘Not right here,'” Jordan said, demonstrating how Payton moved the receiver. “And I would call it maybe an inch and a half.”
According to Johnson, Payton was, “for lack of a better term, anal. In a good way.”
Payton made a presentation to the Broncos last year prior to a midseason win against the Buffalo Bills on “Monday Night Football” that included the elevation of the Bills’ stadium relative to sea level.
He also pays close attention to the science of sleep studies. This was particularly important to him in Denver, as hours are lost when the team travels west to east. Broncos coaches have always stuck to the status quo by flying in Saturday for a Sunday game and arriving back in Denver in the wee hours of the morning after a prime-time game.
Instead, Payton had the Broncos go to Buffalo on Saturday and come home Tuesday for the Monday night game, a trip longer than the Kansas City Chiefs‘ stint in Germany the prior week.
“Every detail matters on the field, then every detail matters around the field, in the facility, in the locker room, in the parking lot,” Payton said. “You just become maniacal with preparation.”
This year, Payton took the Broncos to Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where the Saints held training camp from 2014 to 2016. He wanted to keep the team in the Eastern time zone for Weeks 3 and 4 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Jets. At a cost of roughly $2 million for the week, according to team sources, the Broncos spent five rain-soaked days at the Greenbrier.
The Broncos entered the road trip 0-2 and came home with two wins.
“[To] figure out what our identity is and come back home with two road wins, it was awesome,” Broncos safety P.J. Locke said.
IT’S TOO EARLY to know if the qualities that made Payton successful in New Orleans will translate to Denver, where he is currently 11-12. When Payton joined the Saints, he learned which players had those qualities by putting them through a training camp in the heat at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
The camp included two-a-day practices in full pads, a practice banned by the NFL in the 2012 collective bargaining agreement. Saints assistant offensive line coach Jahri Evans, a recent finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, said Payton started him immediately as a rookie because that camp proved “his makeup.”
Now Payton has to figure out different ways of discovering which players fit his culture.
“It’s not easy,” Evans said. “… You may think it may never happen again but it doesn’t mean you don’t try.”
Payton’s Denver staff, which includes 14 employees with Saints ties, understands what it takes. Payton also made major personnel moves similar to his early New Orleans days, releasing starting quarterback Russell Wilson even though it cost the team $53 million in salary cap space over the next two seasons. All-Pro safety Justin Simmons was also released this offseason.
“Sean was like, ‘No one player is going to be bigger than what we’re trying to do here,'” Moore said of Payton’s Saints days.
Thursday’s game could foreshadow how the rest of the season goes for both Payton and his former assistant, Allen.
A Saints win would snap a four-game losing streak and help Allen take a step away from Payton’s shadow, while a Broncos win could help put them on the road toward their first winning season since 2016.
“Everybody in this building knows who Sean Payton is and if he sees blood in water, he’s going to go try and take advantage,” Jordan said. “That’s always been his M.O.”
Jordan said he expects Payton to embrace any negative reception Thursday and use it as motivation. Regardless, Thursday’s game will be another chapter in the “Game-day Sean” lore.
“He wants to be successful, he wants to dominate,” former Saints running back Mark Ingram II said. “… There’s nothing like Sean Payton. He’s one-of-one. That’s what makes him so great. That’s why he was great in New Orleans all these years and that’s why he’s been challenged with the task to bring Denver Broncos back to prominence. Because he can do it and that’s what he’s about.”