Sean Payton is the greatest head coach in New Orleans Saints history. He has more wins than anyone else who has ever taken the reins of the once-inept franchise. He’s coached more than eight times as many playoff games than the next-closest guy in the Saints’ record book. He’s responsible for the team’s lone Lombardi Trophy.
He somehow coaxed a winning record out of a 2021 team whose starting quarterbacks were Jameis Winston, Taysom Hill, Trevor Siemian, and Ian Book. It appears that’ll be his final accomplishment as head coach in New Orleans. Reports surfaced Tuesday afternoon that he’s stepping away from the game after 16 seasons as the Saints’ head coach.
Sean Payton is retiring, per source
— Nick Underhill (@nick_underhill) January 25, 2022
It’s a surprising decision that makes an already hectic offseason even harder in New Orleans. Payton’s retirement leaves the Saints behind the eight other NFL teams who’ve already dismissed their head coaches. The Chicago Bears, for example, already had three candidates lined up for interviews at approximately the same time Payton reportedly told his team he won’t be back for 2022.
Not only will New Orleans likely have to sift through an already picked-over crop of candidates, they don’t have much in the way of accoutrements to sway a prospective head coach. The Saints, per recent tradition, enter the offseason significantly over next year’s projected salary cap. No team is in a worse spot than their -$74 million in cap space. Years of restructuring contracts and spreading bonuses into the future doesn’t just mean the roster can’t be improved — it means it’ll likely have to get worse before it gets any better.
That means the 2022 version of the team could be without pending free agents Terron Armstead and Marcus Williams. It’ll also have to figure out what to do at quarterback, where Hill is locked in for more than $12 million but Winston is headed to the open market. Whomever takes the reins next will also get the honor of figuring out what the hell to do with Michael Thomas and the three remaining years and roughly $75 million worth of cap hits tied to his contract.
Last year’s Saints were rarely threatening and only stand to get worse. Payton’s abrupt retirement offers the club two paths: to continue limping along while massaging a bloated roster under the salary cap like someone taking out more and more payday loans, or to blow it up and hit reset like the Texans — a team with similar cap issues, a since-gone head coach, and a massive hole at quarterback — did in 2021.
Houston was transparent about its rebuild and was reduced to renting out David Culley for one lame-duck year before firing him. New Orleans may be resigned to a similar outcome. The Saints’ aren’t a destination for upper-tier coaching candidates in this condition. They won’t be for a couple years. The franchise, as is, isn’t a fixer-upper but instead a teardown project.
Payton realized that, likely fielded some calls about joining FOX’s broadcast booth, and hit eject. Now his former franchise has to clean up the mess his crash left behind.
