Saints vs Rams: How Sean Payton studies up to borrow from the best...

[www.si.com]

Saints vs. Rams: How Sean Payton Studies Up to Borrow from the Best (Including Sean McVay)

QUICKLY
To keep his Drew Brees-led offense fresh and unpredictable, Sean Payton devotes hours each week to watching what other innovative offenses around the league are doing—and cribbing from them. That’s why when Sean McVay’s high-flying Rams visit the Superdome this Sunday, they could see a little bit of themselves in what the Saints throw at them

By ALBERT BREER November 01, 2018

The play itself looks normal enough. Third-and-goal, Drew Brees in the shotgun, three receivers to his right, Alvin Kamara flanked left outside Michael Thomas, and motioning in. Brees takes the snap, shovels the ball to Kamara, who goes wide, cuts back between blocks from rookie receiver Tre’Quan Smith and tight end Josh Hill, and prances into the end zone standing.

That three-yard touchdown last week made the score Saints 7, Vikings 0. Quietly, it also said a whole lot more about Sean Payton than you might think.

Payton is 54 now, and it’s been almost 13 years since New Orleans hired him. He’s long since established himself as one of the pre-eminent offensive minds of this era of professional football. And he’s not too proud to admit that he stole that play.

“That was a play seen the week before, Patriots vs. Bears,” Payton said. “Great idea. It fit with what we were doing and had nothing to do with the Vikings. And yet, it applied to their defensive structure. And so, certainly, most of the week is spent watching your opponent’s tape, and yet there’s still going to be a part of the week devoted to the league.”

Go ahead and look it up. You’ll find that, indeed, the Patriots’ last touchdown against the Bears in Week 7 looks pretty much identical to the Saints’ first touchdown against the Vikings in Week 8. Tom Brady in the shotgun. James White motioning in from his left, three receivers to his right. Easy money. A two-yard touchdown, scored, again, standing up.

New Orleans won’t see either of those teams, New England or Chicago, until the postseason, if they see them at all. And yet here’s Payton, in the middle of a game week, with the much-ballyhooed divisional playoff rematch against Minnesota on the horizon, and he’s watching their tape, and applying it days later.

Think of this as Payton’s own school of professional development, and know that it isn’t something he and his staff see as a luxury. It’s a necessity.

“We have to. Yeah, we have to,” Payton continued. “The last thing you want is some trading tip that’s going hot on the floor, and you just didn’t pay attention to it, and everyone else is. Very quickly in our league, a new thought or an idea shows up.”

Now, what’s really cool about this? Payton has a group of offensive coaches from around the league that he makes sure to watch every week. And that list now includes a certain 32-year-old whom he’s up against on Sunday.

But we’re starting with Payton, and his 6-1 Saints, and their showdown with the Rams on Sunday at the Superdome, and how Sean McVay and Payton relate to one another, in a way that McVay might not even know about.

As the Saints coach and I were talking on Thursday morning, he was getting ready to go through a folder of red-zone cutups from across the NFL—“and there’ll be four things I write down that will apply to this week’s game, and it won’t be necessarily just against the Rams.” Coaching assistant Kevin Petry puts the package together, as he does reels of all the touchdowns and third-down plays in the league from the week before.

And then, there’s the tape of specific teams that Payton needs to see.

“We have to see the Patriots offensive film each week,” Payton said. “I could go on. I’m not gonna give you everyone, but Kansas City we have to see each week, Philly, there are teams that we feel each week are doing some different things, unique things, that we want to see and we want to capture. And then how does it fit what we’re doing? I think that’s important. I don’t care what age you are, in this league.”

He wants to see, in other words, what the Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgans of the NFL are doing on the league’s trading floor. The Rams, as he sees them, are the new traders of offensive intel. So each week, just as he’ll see what Josh McDaniels and Andy Reid and Doug Pederson are cooking up, Payton has a McVay file ready.

“It’s definitely one of the tapes we’ll look at,” Payton says.

And as he said, as much as the idea is to continue to keep the offense Drew Brees has been running for 13 years growing at frenetic pace, it’s also to keep up with the others that he believes are approaching the race the way the Saints are.

“I don’t think everyone in the league is that way, he said. “But I know if we do something unique, a handful of coaches are watching us.”

In other words, just as he can show you how White’s score in the Bears-Patriots game helped set up Kamara’s touchdown seven days later, he could unearth one of his concepts being cribbed in some other NFL city. And it’s pretty simple, if you think about it. The idea is that you’re only really getting better if you’re getting better at a faster rate than who and what you’re up against.

That’s why, when I brought up the magnitude of this week’s matchup—it could well determine where the NFC title game is played—Payton wasn’t having it. Nor was he much intrigued at comparing this year’s roster, widely believed to be among the best he’s fielded, against his those of his previous years. Or was he worried much about the win-now message the Eli Apple trade could send to his locker room.

“We’re trying to win, and that’s understood to begin with,” he said.

What Payton did raise was the concern that his team, hot as any in the NFL, had to get better on third down on both sides of the ball. And that it needed to get better in the red zone on defense, and generate more explosive plays on offense.

That’s what all the midweek studying is about to Payton – getting better. So this week, of course he’s watched a ton of Rams defensive tape. And as he does every week, he watched the Rams offense. That means the unbeaten juggernaut from the West Coast may be getting a little of its own medicine on Sunday—which, by the way, is as much a sign of respect, from Payton to McVay, as anything.

“Absolutely,” Payton said. “It’s definitely one of the tapes we’ll look at. You’re always looking for ideas and thoughts. [McVay] does a good job with two or three plays that come out of the same formation. There goes a turbo motion, they hand it to the receiver. There goes a turbo motion, and it’s a zone fallback. Then a turbo motion and a play-action. Then on to the next. Shift, Quick bunch, there at the line.

“They stress you a little bit. As the late [Eagles defensive coordinator] Jim Johnson used to say—some of that at-the-line shift-motion is a way for the offense to blitz the defense. And I think he does that extremely well. Splits are narrow, not a lot of big wide splits, so you get a lot of spray-release routes, routes that expand or routes that come across the field. And certainly the quarterback’s got good command of what they’re doing.”

In short, McVay has given Payton plenty to look at over the last 14 months. And the Saints, to be sure, are better for it. Which is why Rams-Saints should be one of the most compelling games of the 2018 season.