Home Team (24 page)

The Pro Bowl was also being played in Miami this year. Seven Saints players had made the team: Drew Brees, Darren Sharper, Jahri Evans, Jonathan Vilma, Jonathan Goodwin, Roman Harper, and Jon Stinchcomb. They got down to Miami before the other players did. I asked if they wanted to join my little welcome-to-Florida stunt.

“Sure,” all seven of them said.

The only hard part? Finding bellman uniforms big enough to fit the three linemen, Evans, Goodwin and Stinchcomb. A hotel employee named Ana Maria raced in a police cruiser to the home of a heavyset bellman named Bob, who happened to have three spare uniforms he was willing to lend.

As the buses pulled up in front of the hotel, the eight of us were waiting right there. I have to say we looked pretty sharp in our regulation hotel uniforms. We waved as the buses stopped. When the players got out, we asked them crisply: “May I help with your bags, sir?”

It didn’t take long for some of the guys to catch on. This was one beefy crew of bellhops. But it did break the tension when they realized what we’d done. Everyone got a smile.

And from what I hear, some of the guys made pretty good tips!

Every detail from that moment forward was designed to make a point.

When each player got up to his room, there was more in there than free stationery and little bottles of shampoo. There was a Sony video camera. There were gift cards from Morton’s steakhouse, Subway sandwich shops and Cold Stone Creamery. There was a giant basket filled with candy, popcorn and a week’s supply of Title Sports Drinks.

This might all sound minor in the hugeness of the Super Bowl. It was not. I remembered how those Giants players had reacted when they thought the Ravens were getting better swag. I remembered how their wives took every slight so personally—and didn’t keep their disappointment to themselves. With Ornstein handling the execution and Mr. Benson paying the bills, I wanted to make sure there was none of that on our team.

We put on extra hotel security. We didn’t want the players being hassled in the lobby. We paid extra so the team buses would get presidential-motorcade escorts. Traffic didn’t exist for us that week.

And every day, extravagant freebies kept showing up in the rooms.

On Tuesday, it was monster bags of Reebok gear—eight hats, eight T-shirts, two jackets and two sweatshirts. The bags were so big, the hotel bellmen—the real ones—could deliver only four at a time.

On Wednesday every player got a fancy Saints-logoed bathrobe with his name on the back and his number on the sleeve. Thursday it was high-end sweat suits. On Friday, a friend of Ornstein’s from Motorola came up with sixty cutting-edge cell phones that weren’t even on the market yet. Those were a huge hit.

I made sure the wives were taken care of too. Bathrobes, slippers and extra supplies of designer bath products were left in every family’s room.

You knew that, as the week wore on, the players would be out shopping with their families. Or they’d be in some club at night. They’d meet up with Colts players and start swapping stories. Word would get around.

And we began hearing reports: “Really?” the wife of one of the Colts asked. “A Sony camcorder? All we got were caps and T-shirts and a pendant.”

I don’t know exactly where all this stuff came from. Some I know we bought at a discount. Other stuff was donated by companies that wanted to be friendly—or were eager for good PR. We might have traded some tickets with Reebok.

“Listen,” Mike told me when I asked, “if Drew Brees stops in at the local Subway because he got a fifty-dollar gift card, it’s the best fifty dollars Subway ever spent.” He told me Jeremy Shockey said he really needed two of them. “I gave him mine,” Ornstein said. “Guess I’ll have to buy my own Subway sandwich.”

It was amazing how much difference these little touches made. Ten-million-dollar professional athletes had their dispositions brightened by fifty-dollar gift cards. But all week long I heard from the players about what great stuff they were finding in their rooms and how cool their wives and family thought the whole experience was.

It would never let up.

The family lunches and dinners. The pregame tailgate party on Sunday afternoon. The thirty state troopers ready to drive anyone anywhere. The extravagant plans for a victory party, just in case.

For most of these players and their families, this was going to be the most amazing week of their lives. These were not, by and large, young men from privileged backgrounds. Most of them came from tough city neighborhoods and out-of-the-way small towns, although some had attended top universities.

I wanted the environment to be as confidence-building as possible for our players—and maybe just a little rattling to the Colts.

I wanted our guys to keep their minds on football.

THE BOLDEST PLAY IN
Super Bowl history was supposed to be a fake punt, not an ambush onside kick. And here’s something else I’m not happy about. When we opened the second half of the Super Bowl with that game-changing surprise, we nearly ran it in the wrong direction. Had I known the kick would produce a never-ending mosh pit on the field, I probably wouldn’t have run it at all.

But thank God I did.

You could call this adjusting deftly to changing circumstances. You could also call it the coach nearly screwing up.

Saturday night, we had our final special teams meeting. Everyone was in that meeting except the quarterbacks and maybe another player or two. Pretty much everybody has something to do with kickoffs, field goals, punts and returns. The forty-five-minute meeting, just on special teams, started at eight o’clock.

“Give me five minutes first,” I told Greg McMahon, our special teams coordinator. “I want to talk to everyone. I want them to hear this come out of my mouth.”

I walked in and said to the players: “Hey, pay attention. This is important.

“Tomorrow night, when we play this game—and I don’t know when it’s gonna happen. We might be up ten. We might be up seventeen.” No losing scenarios. We would be ahead.

“We’re gonna run this onside kick. We’re gonna run ambush. And you guys gotta make me right here. You gotta make me right.”

The way I said it was more a command than a request.

“I just want to tell you that so you’re not surprised when it comes out of my mouth tomorrow.”

Originally, ambush wasn’t going to be our big surprise in the Super Bowl. A week and a half earlier, I’d gone on a tangent about wanting to run a fake punt. I’d talked to Parcells. We talked about trying to steal a possession from Indianapolis. He had done that in the 1990 NFC championship game out in San Francisco when he was with the Giants. He’d run a fake punt, and it ended up being pivotal in their upset victory over the 49ers. The Giants went on to beat Buffalo in the Super Bowl. I spoke to Greg and Mike Mallory, our assistant special teams coach. They knew I’d been scheming with Parcells. “What’s our best fake-punt option?” I asked them.

Nothing’s worse, when you’re an assistant coach, than hearing that the head coach has been talking with his old mentor and is saying, “This is what I want to do.”

I knew what they were all saying to themselves: “
Ugh!
We have a thousand things going on here, and he’s talking to Parcells again.”

But we spent some time studying tape and trying to figure out what would be the right opportunity, and it really didn’t present itself. There were too many variables. Some of the looks were good, but two-thirds of them weren’t. The players and the coaches knew I was interested in this. They knew I was pushing it. Yet they also knew enough to tell me what they really thought. At practice, Jason Kyle, our long snapper who’s been in the league fifteen years, came over to me at one point. I could just tell he’d been sent by the coaches.

“Hey, Coach,” he said, “this fake-punt thing—it’s—I don’t know. There’s so many different looks. It’s a mixed bag and—”

“I got it,” I said. “All right, I got it. You guys don’t want to run a fake punt. I get you.”

That was important information. They didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. They told me what I needed to hear. So we began down a different avenue. What else could we do here? How else were we going to take a possession away? Everybody was trying to puzzle this out. I was convinced that winning the turnover game really might make the difference for us in the Super Bowl. The Colts had a very methodical offense. But they couldn’t make yardage, and they couldn’t score points anytime we managed to snatch the ball. Near the end of the bye week, Greg and Mike came to me. This was Friday. We were still in New Orleans. Greg said, “What do you think about an ambush onside kick?”

An onside kick—not as a desperation move late in the half or the game, but at some point that the other team thought you had no reason to do it.

We had used the play once before, in 2007 against Jacksonville. It was a team that was leading early. We ran the play in that game, the ball literally hit the turf and three of our guys were on it. There wasn’t a Jaguar uniform within ten yards.

It was worth a look at least.

Thomas Morstead—our punter, who also handled kickoffs—started practicing the kick. He was a rookie with a powerful right leg and excellent aim.

The technique isn’t so different from kicking a soccer ball. With the receiving team expecting a long, high kick ending up back near their end zone, Morstead would have to kick the ball hard to the left, making sure it went at least ten yards past the line of scrimmage. That’s the rule. To be legal, an onside kick has to go at least ten yards past the line of scrimmage. But the ball had to stay close enough to us that our guys had a good chance of grabbing it.

I was encouraged by what I saw Thursday, Friday and Saturday in New Orleans. Every time we ran the play in practice, the ball landed perfectly. Morstead could land the ball where he wanted to and do it repeatedly. Anthony Hargrove and the other guys on the kickoff unit were getting psyched. They knew they could beat the Colts to the ball. They weren’t even thinking about the possibility of not recovering the ball.

I liked that.

Pretty soon, the players were almost challenging me. “You won’t call this,” Hargrove said. “You won’t call this in the Super Bowl.”

Clearly, they were learning to push my buttons.

We were counting on Morstead’s technique, of course. But we were also counting on our line. They had to turn and shut up the return. We couldn’t afford to be flat-footed at the moment of impact. If we were, the Colts would be able to take a step, react and then it would just be a fifty-fifty proposition as to which team ended up with the ball.

I was looking for better than even odds. Much better.

WHILE MIKE ORNSTEIN WAS
spreading Saints gris-gris across South Florida, I was planning my own special ops for the team. Bill Parcells had a few ideas to share.

“Do not wait an extra minute,” he said. “Get ’em in here and fuckin’ practice. When the Colts are just arriving, you have a practice already under way. You’ll be pissing on their turf before they even get there.”

It was raining on Monday after the players checked in to the team hotel. I didn’t give them much time to play with their fancy new camcorders. We got right to work. In this weather, we couldn’t use our assigned field at the University of Miami. It was outdoors. There was an indoor bubble at the Miami Dolphins’ practice facility in Fort Lauderdale, near the field the Colts were using. In case of rain, the NFL had decided, the two teams would rotate use of the bubble.

But there was no conflict on Monday afternoon. The Colts weren’t even in Florida yet. They were still traveling from Indianapolis. They weren’t arriving until six thirty p.m. We had no competition for the bubble. We had a great practice. The Colts arrived just as we were winding down.

The visuals were perfect. We got exactly the TV pictures Parcells had predicted we would, contrasting images from the Monday before the Super Bowl. Our players, pads on, sweating after a good, hard practice as the Colts were just showing up.

Bill and I had spent a lot of time talking in the two weeks before the Super Bowl. Who better? He’d been there—three times. He believed in leaving nothing to chance. I had asked him, “When we get to Miami, would you speak to the team?”

He was a little torn. He was an employee of the Miami Dolphins, team president. It would be different if he were retired, he said. He was reluctant to meet formally with the players on one team, especially when the Super Bowl was in Miami. Twenty years ago, a guy like that could speak to a team and nobody outside would even know it. Now, with Twitter, bloggers, agents, anything that takes place in this league is immediately known everywhere. Nothing—and I mean nothing—happens in secret on an NFL team.

“I’d like to speak to your team,” Bill told me. “I’m rooting for you. You know I’m rooting for you like a son. But I respectfully decline, and you have to understand why.”

“Listen,” I said. “There’s no need to say anything more. I understand. I also know how you feel. Just come watch us practice when we get there.”

“Great,” he said. “And I may have a message for you to deliver to them.”

Bill came with Tony Sparano, whom I’d been with for three years in Dallas and whom I probably was closest to on that Cowboys staff. Tony was Bill’s head coach in Miami now. They came to practice and just hung out. It was awesome having Bill there. He had a chance to watch us. He looked exactly like a proud dad.

Tuesday is always Media Day at the Super Bowl. No practice on Tuesday. So Monday night, a number of the players decided they would go out. They figured this was their chance to cut loose in Miami. I didn’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not naive. If I were a player, that’s the night I’d be going out. But I’d damn sure make the Tuesday morning bus.