Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches Read Online Free PDF

to making his decision. Payton really wanted Williams, a move that might have paid off in a Super Bowl championship but eventually did major damage to Payton’s career.
    “Hey, let’s get to a million five. I don’t want to lose this guy. There’s a number of coordinators making a million five. I’ll throw in $250,000 of my own money,” Payton said.
    “Let me talk to Mr. Benson. Call me back,” Loomis said.
    Benson gave the okay. Payton called Williams. It was their first conversation about money. “It’s going to be a million five per year for three years,” Payton said.
    The next morning, Payton called Loomis. He wanted to make sure his $250,000 contribution was just for one year. The Saints would be on the hook for the entire payment in the second and third years. Payton was not surprised that the Saints took him up on his offer. “It was all good,” he said. “I just signed a contract for about $5.5 million a year. I wanted Mickey and Mr. Benson to feel like, ‘I’m in with this hire. Let’s go.’ ”
    Payton never told Williams he was paying part of his salary. Around the Super Bowl that season, ESPN reported that the Saints had reimbursed Payton the $250,000 in week nine. Williams already was paying dividends. The Saints wound up number one in the NFL in point differential and number three in turnover differential. Tracy Porter clinched the Super Bowl when he intercepted Peyton Manning and returned it 74 yards for a touchdown with just over three minutes remaining.
    At the time, it seemed like the best $250,000 Payton would ever spend. But Williams wound up costing him more than twenty times as much in salary for 2012 that will never be reimbursed. Shortly after the 2011 season, Williams was gone, out of town before the bounty scandal erupted. People close to Paytonsaid that even before the Saints got in trouble with the league, he had no intention of asking Williams to return in 2012.
    The Saints’ 2011 season ended in the divisional round of the playoffs in San Francisco, a crushing 36–32 loss. New Orleans took leads with 4:02 and 2:37 remaining, but each time Williams’s defense gave up a touchdown, first on a 28-yard run by Alex Smith and then on Smith’s 14-yard touchdown pass to Vernon Davis with just nine seconds left in the game.
    Nearly three months after that game, a damaging audiotape surfaced of Williams meeting with the defensive players at their San Francisco airport hotel the night before the loss to the 49ers. The audio became public on the same day Payton was appealing his suspension to Goodell. It was bad timing for Payton, but Goodell knew about the tape before it went viral on the Internet. The recording was made public by filmmaker Sean Pamphilon, who was working on a documentary about former Saints special teams star Steve Gleason, who had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. The tape reveals Williams calling for his players to target Smith, running back Frank Gore, tight end Vernon Davis, and wide receivers Michael Crabtree and Kyle Williams.
    “We’ve got to do everything in the world to make sure we kill Frank Gore’s head. We want him running sideways. We want his head sideways,” Williams was heard saying. He then said, “We hit fucking Smith right there,” while pointing to his chin. “Remember me. I got the first one. I got the first one. Go lay the motherfucker out.” When he said “I got the first one,” Pamphilon said, Williams was rubbing his hands together like the sign for money. He encouraged his players to “affect the head. Continue, touch and hit the head,” coming off the pile. He said they needed to hit wide receiver Kyle Williams early—he’d had a concussion problem during the season. Then, talking about Crabtree, he said, “We need to decide whether Crabtree wants to be a fake-ass prima donna or he wants to be a tough guy. We need to find thatout. He becomes human when we fucking take out that outside ACL [anterior cruciate