Sean Payton Handed Away the Play Sheet That Defined His Career

Sean Payton

Photo: All-Pro Reels / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 29, 1963 San Mateo
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Super Bowl
Individual awards	AP NFL Coach of the Year · Super Bowl XLIV champion (head coach)

Sean Payton built his name on the moments when he refused to hand the decision to anyone else. The onside kick that opened the second half of Super Bowl XLIV was his call. So was every offensive play his teams ran across eighteen seasons as an NFL head coach. Then, heading into his fourth year with the Denver Broncos and coming off a season that ended one game short of the Super Bowl, he gave the play sheet to Davis Webb, a former backup quarterback who had never called a down in a regular-season game.

That is the question his career is asking now: whether a coach who rebuilt two franchises around his own voice can win the title Denver believes it is ready for by speaking a little less. “I don’t want to be the one to stop progress,” he said when he explained the change. The Broncos believed him enough to sign him to a five-year extension a few months later.

The road to that sideline ran through plenty of rejection. Payton was born in San Mateo, California, on December 29, 1963, and grew up mostly in Naperville, Illinois. At Eastern Illinois University he played quarterback in Al Molde’s pass-heavy offense, known on campus as “Eastern Airlines,” and led the Panthers to an 11–2 record in 1986. No NFL team drafted him. He passed through the Arena Football League; during the 1987 players’ strike he joined the Chicago Bears as a replacement player, one of the so-called Spare Bears, completing 8 of 23 passes in three games. His only interception came against the New Orleans Saints. A season quarterbacking the Leicester Panthers in England followed, and then he accepted that his future was on the other side of the headset.

The apprenticeship was long and itinerant: San Diego State, Indiana State, Miami of Ohio, Illinois, then the Philadelphia Eagles as quarterbacks coach. With the New York Giants he became offensive coordinator and reached Super Bowl XXXV, though in his last season there head coach Jim Fassel took the play-calling away from him. It is a detail worth keeping in mind today. Three years in Dallas under Bill Parcells came next, as assistant head coach, and Payton is credited with persuading the Cowboys to sign an undrafted quarterback named Tony Romo.

New Orleans hired him in 2006, a year after Hurricane Katrina had driven the Saints out of their stadium and left them 3–13. He paired with a free-agent quarterback, Drew Brees, and in their first season together the Saints reached the first NFC Championship Game in franchise history. Payton was named AP Coach of the Year.

Three seasons later the Saints beat Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts 31–17 in Super Bowl XLIV. The game turned on the surprise onside kick Payton ordered to start the second half and closed on Tracy Porter’s interception return for a touchdown. It was the club’s first championship. The memoir that followed, Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life, written with Ellis Henican, opened at number eight on The New York Times nonfiction list. Across sixteen years in New Orleans he won 161 games, more than any coach in Saints history, and he stepped down a year after Brees retired.

The tidy version of that run tends to skip a year. In 2012 the NFL suspended Payton for an entire season over the Saints’ bounty program, under which players were paid for injuring opponents, and he became the first head coach in modern league history to be suspended for any reason. Commissioner Roger Goodell’s case rested on Payton’s duty to supervise his staff and on an email about a bounty on Aaron Rodgers, which Payton first said he had not read and later admitted he had. He spent the suspension in Texas as offensive coordinator of his son Connor’s sixth-grade team. Netflix later turned that exile into Home Team, with Kevin James playing Payton, and the film tells it as a family comedy. That version is kind to him, and it has outlived the bounty memos in popular memory.

Denver has seen the harder edge too. The Broncos sent a first-round and a second-round pick to New Orleans to get him, and in his first season he benched Russell Wilson for the final two games of an 8–9 year, a move the club explained as preserving “financial flexibility.” What came next justified the price. With the rookie Bo Nix at quarterback, Denver reached the playoffs in 2024 for the first time since 2015, and Payton became only the eighth head coach to beat all 32 NFL teams. Last season the Broncos went 14–3, won eleven straight, took the AFC West and the conference’s top seed, and beat the Buffalo Bills in the Divisional Round. Nix suffered a season-ending ankle injury in the closing seconds of that win. With Jarrett Stidham at quarterback, Denver lost the AFC Championship Game to the New England Patriots, 10–7.

That is the setting in which Payton let go of the play sheet in February. Webb, his quarterbacks coach since 2023 after a short career as a backup, now chooses the calls; Payton called him talented and quicker, and said he would not have made the change unless he thought it would help the team. In June, owner Greg Penner signed Payton to the new five-year deal and credited him with “an impressive turnaround.”

The early returns are mixed. Denver opened the 2026 season with a loss at Kansas City, then needed fourth-quarter rallies to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars 20–13 and, after trailing 16–0 at halftime, the Los Angeles Rams 30–26, a game that ended with safety Talanoa Hufanga intercepting Matthew Stafford at the goal line. Payton has called the slow starts “the $6 million question.” His history argues for patience: his .761 winning percentage in October is the best in NFL history among coaches with at least 50 games in that month.

Away from the field, Payton has two children, Meghan and Connor, from his marriage to Beth Shuey, whom he met while coaching at Indiana State; the couple filed for divorce in 2012. He married Skylene Montgomery in Cabo San Lucas in 2021. A year earlier he had become the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the NFL.

His influence already runs through other sidelines. Dan Campbell in Detroit, Aaron Glenn with the New York Jets and Joe Brady in Buffalo all worked under him. The next test is closer to home: a trip to Santa Clara to face the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, October 4, with Webb holding the sheet and Payton deciding how much of himself to keep out of it.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Bo Nix, Denver Broncos, Sean Payton, Home Team, New Orleans Saints

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