MIAMI — There comes a point when every coach has to confront Bill Parcells’ old friend, when the guy in the glass stares back and inquires, none too subtly, “So? What are you going to do now?”
That’s where Sean Payton stood last night, while an aging classic rock band hijacked halftime and the Saints’ coach had to ask himself if he was through doubling down. Just before the break, he’d opted to go for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal, and he’d sent in an ultra-conservative running call to boot, taking the play out of Drew Brees’ hands.
Going for it had been smart and gutsy, hedging the bet was not. The Saints were only down 10-6, were still very much alive in Super Bowl XLIV, but they weren’t going to topple the Colts and Peyton Manning by tilting to the right. Payton probably knew that already. The guy in the glass just confirmed it.
“We were going to be aggressive,” Payton would say later. “We were going to try and force something. That’s the way we think. It’s the only way we think.”
From the moment the people had started filing into Sun Life Stadium yesterday afternoon, it was clear who the sentimental favorite would be, obvious that save for the pockets of Peyton Manning and Dallas Clark and Reggie Wayne jerseys, the Who Dats would far outnumber the Hoosiers among the 74,059.
Now, Payton would give them something to scream about, give them something to wrap their arms around for real, for good, forever. Because while everyone else had been listening to The Who, Payton opted to go with the stones. He ordered Thomas Morstead, the Saints’ kickoff specialist, to dribble it onside.
“I wasn’t worried,” Morstead would admit. “I was terrified.”
But what Payton had done, in that singular and seminal decision, was the same thing Rex Ryan had done for the Jets so often this season, what Bill Belichick always does for his very best Patriots teams. He’d looked them in the eyes and he’d delivered a simple message: Get the hell after it. I’ve got your back.
“We weren’t going to hope good things could happen to us,” running back Pierre Thomas would say. “We were going to make them happen.”
So Brees would get the MVP and he would deliver as textbook-perfect a performance as anyone could ever want, throwing for 288 yards and two touchdowns. And Tracy Porter, for the second straight game, would step in front of a Hall of Famer’s spiral and all but turn the French Quarter into a salt shaker of joy. And Payton’s players would seize the moment, winning 31-17, outplaying and overpowering the favored Colts, finishing off the fairy tale.
But it was Payton who’d set it all in motion, who’d made an investment in his own team’s confidence. Jim Caldwell, by contrast, had timidly opted to put the brakes on his peerless two-minute offense after the Colts’ goal-line stand late in the half, and he’d foolishly asked Matt Stover — who’s so old he could’ve been one of Roger Daltrey’s childhood heroes — to try to kick a 51-yard field goal. That didn’t lose the game for the Colts, but coaches hardly ever lose games for their players.
It’s even rarer for them to win one for them.
“When you see a coach make a decision like that, it lays it all out on the line for you and you have to respect that,” linebacker Jonathan Vilma said. “You have to feel good that he believes in you. And you’d better believe in yourself after something like that.”
They believed, all right, and isn’t it funny how good things happen for teams who believe? Back in 1967, on the first-ever play in the team’s history and before the avalanche of negativity that would follow across the decades, John Gilliam returned the first opening kickoff in Saints history 94 yards for a touchdown. That was the last time, until yesterday, that the Saints as a team and New Orleans as a city truly believed in destiny.
Sean Payton decided to believe. He stalked destiny, and created some of his own, and it was a hell of a thing to see.
Payton’s now among Giants
Sean Payton joined a glittery club last night when he guided his Saints to a 31-17 win in Super Bowl XLIV. Yes, there is the other group, an exclusive group of men who actually have been head coaches of Super Bowl winners — a number that now stands at 26. But Payton also entered an even more select subset: former Giants coordinators who have won Super Bowls as head coaches. You want a list? This is a list:
Vince Lombardi (2). Tom Landry (2). Bill Parcells (2). Bill Belichick (3).
And that doesn’t even include Tom Coughlin, who wasn’t a coordinator when he was on the Giants’ staff for Super Bowl XXV. So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s now 10 championships, earned by two men already in the Hall of Fame and by two others who will go in as soon as they’ve decided to go fishing. Now Payton.
Payton’s departure from the Giants wasn’t quite as amicable as the other four men were — one (Parcells) was promoted, the other three simply left for better opportunities elsewhere, but he doesn’t hold a grudge.
“My time with the Giants was an incredible learning experience,” he said of his time under Jim Fassel. “I’m grateful for it.”
VAC’S WHACKS
* Maybe Jim Caldwell should have listened more closely during halftime when Roger Daltrey vowed that he won’t get fooled again; might’ve made him a little more aware of the onside kick to come.
* Was that Peter Townshend with the guitar slung over his shoulder at halftime, by the way, or Uncle Junior?
* If that referee looked familiar to you, Giants fans, there’s a reason: it was Scott Green, who, back in the ’02 playoffs at San Francisco, didn’t call the illegal takedown of Rich Seubert on the last play of that awful loss to the Niners.
* I probably would have let my jaw drop when I saw that parking for yesterday’s Super Bowl cost $75, even if I didn’t already know that a 50-yard-line ticket to Super Bowl I cost all of $10.
* I do hope you’ve taken advantage of the fact that our old friend Peter Finney Jr. has been gracing the Post’s pages all week, because he’s hit one home run after another his entire time in South Florida.
* Good for Floyd Little, who said for the record that he hoped his Hall of Fame induction wouldn’t be a posthumous one. His backfield mate at Syracuse, Tom Coughlin, will need another big trophy to his name before they can reunite in Canton.
