How Sean Payton Was Drawn Back to the NFL, With a Familiar Plan for the Broncos

After taking a year off, the former Saints coach is building a similar foundation in Denver, with revived intention and a restored confidence in the work.

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If the jerseys at Broncos camp didn’t have numbers, the truth is you might not even have noticed Russell Wilson was out on the practice fields. On this August morning, the fans aren’t around either—just the players and the coaches—and the efficiency and length of the session are the show, instead of how any individual star might shine or some story line could unfold.

It’s all in stark contrast to what was going on here in the south suburbs of Denver last summer. Every bit of that difference is by design.

This is Sean Payton’s camp.

The day Payton was hired, he was asked about Wilson’s having his own staff working out of the practice facility. The new coach responded that the idea was “foreign” to him and added it was “not gonna take place here” anymore. It sounded hard and harsh, but the reality is it was in accordance with the implicit mandate of the job he took—not just to cure the ills of 2022, but, really, fix all that’s gone awry since Peyton Manning retired after Super Bowl 50.

Payton arrived in Denver with much of the same philosophy that helped him build sustained success in New Orleans :: Rob Schumacher/The Republic/USA TODAY Network

And while it sure wasn’t the last time Payton would say something that risked rubbing someone the wrong way (of course), the coach’s year off from the sideline gave him plenty of time to think about how he’d do this. So none of what’s happening now is by mistake.

Not the fact that every player on the roster is wearing protective Guardian Caps at practice—even beyond just players required to (linemen, tight ends, running backs and linebackers). Not that practices go well past two hours. Not that this session wrapped with sets of gassers, the sort of conditioning you see less and less of in the NFL’s summer these days. And certainly not that the hype on Wilson, and all the bells and whistles that came with it, is effectively gone.

A reset, recharged Payton may be returning to the NFL, different in some ways. An extended chance to step away and see a bigger picture will do that to a person. But signs and signals are everywhere here that the big stuff, the foundation off which he’ll build, is largely the same.

“I’m getting back to the thing where, man, our early part of the schedule is going to be important,” Payton said, leaning into a table in the Denver lunchroom after practice. “I go back to New Orleans in ’06, my first year with the program, this is a 3–13 team that had trouble. They were displaced because of Katrina, they were moved to San Antonio, and, because of that, we had a training camp for six and a half weeks in Jackson. We had to play our preseason games on the road. So just a long training camp.

“Man, I didn’t know what that team was going to be like. But Week 1 we beat Cleveland on the road. Then we had a huge win. We came back and beat Green Bay, down 13. And then opened at home in Atlanta, and the next thing we know, it’s 3–0. And confidence is born with these teams that have demonstrated ability. I think that’s important for our team now.”

Payton romanticizes that oppressive summer of ’06 in Mississippi for a reason. It set the standard for a decade and a half to follow. Results followed for the coach and his Saints.

Likewise, here, the work has come first. History tells him the rest will take care of itself.

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We’re headed into the final week of the preseason and on the doorstep of cutdowns, with high school football starting up in some parts of the country and college football back next weekend. So let’s dive right in. Coming on the site this week, you’ll find …

• A look at Mac Jones’s weird road to a critical Year 3.

• What I saw being around Bryce Young for the first time.

• Takeaways on everything that was anything over the last week.

But we’re starting with Payton’s Broncos and the massive change that’s come to Denver over the last seven months.

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Marquez Callaway was brought in from New Orleans in March to be a torchbearer for the new Broncos boss, and it didn’t take long before the questions came for him. His teammates had plenty: ’Quez, was he like this all the time? Do we always have to do this? I’m not used to this, do we usually stay out for this long? Is this normal?

His responses were to the point, each of them validated by his choice to go to Denver.

“I’m like, Hey, it works. That’s why we’re doing it,” Callaway says with a laugh. “A lot of guys, they do ask. … [The key is] we’re going through this together.”

Is what they’re going through old school? “Oh, it’s old school,” he quickly responds.

And it’s also Payton, back in his element, with all the lessons of a year off.

For his part, the 59-year-old doesn’t have some story from last year of smelling the cut grass in July or coming across a high school practice in his car or reading some coverage of the league that made him yearn to get back on the sideline. Mostly, he enjoyed the time he gave himself to unwind after 15 seasons at the helm in New Orleans.

He and his wife, Skylene, spent most of the summer of 2022, save for a few days at a Fox seminar, at their lake house in Idaho. He played golf. He checked in on football stuff at his leisure, staying on top of things for his studio analyst job at Fox. He had time for his grown-up kids, one in California and the other in Texas. He even got to play in his club’s August member-guest tournament, something he’d never gotten to do before.

Then the season started. In September, he started making the commute from Idaho to Los Angeles on Fridays, taking part in production calls on Saturdays, crew dinners at night and early wake-up calls on Sunday mornings.

“Sunday morning would start at 5:30,” Payton says. “There’d be a production meeting for that first show, you’d kind of go through everything. And then the whole day you’re in that green room, watching the games. And you’re watching [results] come in. And you’re watching the TV copy, not the all-22, and you’re discussing all these things and you see that the season goes by pretty quick.

“But you’re following these teams that have turned it around. Opening weekend, the Giants have a big win at Tennessee, they go for two at the end. Minnesota gets a win. So some of those teams that flip the switch, if you will, you saw some early success in their seasons.”

Payton isn’t pulling those two teams out of the 32 by accident. Knowing that (whether it was in 2023 or ’24), he would soon almost certainly be trying to do what Brian Daboll and Kevin O’Connell were doing, Payton took a special interest in them. So if you ask what he noticed or picked up most in getting the 30,000-foot view of the league, the answer is academic.

“The global view for me would’ve been more teams [than schemes] and the turnarounds that took place in Minnesota and New York,” Payton says. “That’ll be important for us.”

In particular, he saw how two staffs were able to leverage more out of veteran quarterbacks and win with accomplished players they inherited, rather than just going in and detonating the place. It is pretty much exactly what he’s trying to do now.

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As the season wore on, there were parts of Payton’s coaching routine to be reprised.

He, of course, was never going to spend his year off grinding tape until midnight every night. But once the games got going, he’d get his offensive scheme fix every Monday morning, the same way he did when he was coaching. And that meant digging in on film of trendsetters and league leaders, the same way he had in his time as a rising young offensive assistant.

“There’s going to be six or seven [offenses], and then there’s going to be a jump-on-board, one or two that all of a sudden, Hey, we got to watch what these guys are doing. They’re leading the league currently,” Payton says. “So there’s some trends where you just want to stay on top of what’s happening in your business. And I kind of look at it that way. So even though you have an opponent you’re playing that weekend, you’re watching all of that tape.

Payton studied first-year coaches who succeeded in 2022 like he wants to in his first season with the Broncos :: Ron Chenoy/USA TODAY Sports

“So while our offensive staff is meeting, I might go look at a third-down study and see, Hey, currently, these guys are … to try to bring more information to the meeting, outside the box.”

The way it went in New Orleans, and last year in Idaho and California, Payton would start with all of Sunday’s touchdowns, going, in order, from the shortest scores to the longest ones. Then, it’d be on to his list of top offensive coaches, which would fluctuate by year.

“We’d stay on top of what Sean [McVay] is doing at the Rams, what Kyle [Shanahan] is doing in San Francisco,” Payton says. “When I first got into the league, it was always Mike Shanahan at Denver, [Mike] Holmgren at Green Bay, Bill Walsh in San Fran. It was Kansas City film. There were certain teams you watched. There’s an ebb and flow to that. Pretty soon, Detroit, I was studying them. They did a lot of good things last year offensively—quietly, they had a really good offensive season. Absolutely Josh [McDaniels], he’s at Vegas.”

That kept Payton’s mind working.

And sure, he missed the tactical challenge week to week. But he could, at least to some degree, scratch that itch with that Monday routine. What he found harder to replicate and easy to miss—on his weekdays, as he’d get his cup of coffee every morning and take the dog out—was being on a team.

“It’s the daily interaction with so many people,” he says. “I think the one thing that’s difficult for the players, especially, but also the coaches, man, that first year they’re out or away from it, there’s no itinerary, there’s no schedule, the structure is kind of ... get up when you want.”

Simply put, when he got up, the people he was used to seeing weren’t there anymore.

“The thing that was maybe a little underrated, or maybe I didn’t appreciate as much, is man, the friendships,” he says. “So, like, Mickey [Loomis] and I have spent 16 years together, and all of a sudden, I’m on the West Coast, I see him once in a while. I go back to New Orleans, we golf. But it’s like, man, I’m used to seeing him every day. Greg Bensel, I’d see every day. Doug Miller, the coaches there, Pete Carmichael [Jr.], all of a sudden, those guys, that part of it, it’s missing me. Dennis Lauscha. You miss the friendships. …

“When you go from being every day’s football, to then it’s just Sunday, you’re looking forward to that interaction with people. Because you do miss the daily interaction. It’s quiet. Your wife looks at you like, You’re driving me crazy. What are you going to do?”

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Payton eventually tired of commuting from Idaho, so he and his wife rented a house in Manhattan Beach, a few go routes from the Fox lot in Century City, and his coffee-and-walk-the-dog routine picked up there.

Even then, Payton wasn’t certain he’d come back in 2023.

On one hand, life in Los Angeles was comfortable. The setting was amazing; the work was very manageable; and his daughter, Meghan, was close by. On the other hand, the tug was there.

“We’re all creatures of habit, and so you go from this almost military-like structure, relative to a routine, to the opposite,” Payton says. “And [late Saints owner Tom] Benson, take this the right way, he didn’t say retirement was overrated, but he, even when he was 90, would come in at nine o’clock, get his coffee. He was working, and he’d say your brain’s sharper for it. When all of that goes away, I think it’s easy for, not your health to slip, but just [to miss] the interaction.

“They do studies now. My wife’s a nurse practitioner, and longevity, lifetime, lifespan in close-knit families or people in companies—that adds to it. And so when that’s all gone, there’s only so much coffee and walking the dogs and golf you can play. And then you’re …”

You’re looking for more, he continues, and he was by the time January rolled around.

Where he would eventually find his next step might have surprised some people, even in his circle. But in learning how much he missed so many of the relationships he had in New Orleans, Payton knew wherever he landed would need to have the potential for that—or else he’d be content to sit another year.

“That’s where this one made sense. And it had to do with [CEO] Greg [Penner] and Carrie [Walton Penner], [GM] George [Paton]. It had to do with the front office and ownership group. It was hard to find that,” he says. “And I think in my experience and over the years, I had it in New Orleans. And the three things that hit here were ownership, front office and certainly it’s a fan base in an important market.

He has it again now, and the place he’s in is apparent to those who know him, mostly in how the Broncos are being run—with a focus, intensity and purpose to everything being done.

Quickly, he’s been able to establish a lot of what worked in New Orleans here.

Which, he thinks, is a good early sign of where the Broncos are.

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A lot is being asked of the Broncos, with the expectation being that the return will match the investment the guys are putting in. And that with every gasser, and every long practice, and every time a player subjugates his ego or does something because the guy next to him is, too, there’s a grander plan at work, the same one that turned the Saints around.

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“I think it was just the togetherness there, when the guys come and say, What y’all got here is special. You can actually feel it,” Callaway says. “You came in, it didn’t feel like working. It felt like you’d be coming in and you were about to play football. And that’s what we’re here for: to play football. And that’s when [Payton] got the job here, and when he gave me that call, I felt like he was going to take what he had there in New Orleans and bring it here.

“The culture he brings, all coaches bring the players together, and everybody knows who he is, the success he’s had. So it wasn’t hard for people to buy in.”

The version of Payton they’re getting, as the coach himself sees it, is one in a better place than he’s been in years. He concedes now he was a little worn down after a decade and a half in New Orleans. He needed the break.

Now that he’s had it, you can ask the Broncos’ players how ready he was to roll.

“There’s a grind to every season,” Payton says. “Sometimes you get away from it, and it’s not often you can do that. It’s unusual, but there are benefits from it. Because for me, there’s a certain grind relative to my hours. And I know it’s not the case for everyone, but yeah, when you’re away for a year, it happened in ’12 during that suspension, coming back, you’re refreshed and you’re sharp. We had a real good season in ’13.

“It’s kind of like, the racetrack’s two miles away, the lights are on, you can hear the cars running, you can smell the gasoline, but you’re not in the cockpit. You just kind of hear it all, and you’re drawn to it again.”

And that’s put him on that practice field, across the country from where he was before, with something that, even if it’s tweaked a little, should look awfully familiar. It sure would to a lot of people in New Orleans, too. The work necessary, Payton believes, always should.

Soon enough, we’ll get to see if the results do, too.