— Sean Payton is on a roll.
He’s walking the pristine practice field here at Broncos headquarters and describing the state-of-the-art, $175 million training facility the club plans to break ground on this fall.
The 205,000-square-foot facility will connect to the towering Pat Bowlen Fieldhouse on the west side of the campus and feature a player-centric first floor, including a new locker room, weight room, cafeteria and health and performance center. The practice field will feature a large grass berm on the east side of the practice fields with a massive awning to protect fans from the Colorado sun during practices.
When completed in 2026, it will be the finest facility in the NFL, the Taj Mahal of training complexes. And every penny of the project is being privately funded.
“It’s going to be fantastic,” said Payton, a twinkle in his eye. "Everything about the set-up is going to be great."
If Payton looks and sounds like a kid on Christmas morning, it’s because he is. He has a new quarterback (Bo Nix), a remade roster of young and hungry players and a new vibe in the building at Broncos Park as he enters his second season as the Broncos head coach.
Spend a few days with Payton as I did earlier this month, and it’s easy to see why he was attracted to the job when he returned to coaching a year ago after leaving the Saints in 2022.
One of the most successful franchises in NFL history, the Broncos have won 15 division titles, made eight Super Bowl appearances and hoisted the Lombardi Trophies three times in their 65-year tenure. Fifteen former players are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as is former owner Pat Bowlen.
More important to the rich history, though, are the Broncos’ rich owners. The club is owned and operated by the Walton-Penner Group, led by Walmart heirs Rob Walton, Greg Penner and Carrie Walton Penner. Their estimated net worth of $78 billion makes them the wealthiest owners in the NFL, worth more than the next four richest NFL owners combined.
“I was interested in this job because of the ownership and the front office structure,” Payton said. “This is a good group, very sharp. They’ve been fantastic.”
The Walton-Penner Group's pockets are so deep they paid for the installation of a new grass field at Empower Field at Mile High Stadium so the players could have a safe playing surface for the final game of the 2022 season — a $400,000 bill for essentially one game, in a season in which the team finished 5-12.
Likewise, they spent $500,000 to upgrade the artificial turf in the indoor facility to a new state-of-the-art product, even though the old turf still had 10 years of life left.
"Everything matters" is one of Payton's favorite maxims. And in that regard, the Broncos owners put their money where their mouth is.
"They know what they're doing here," said Broncos tight end Adam Trautman, who came to Denver from New Orleans via trade last year. "And it's only going to get better.”
The seemingly boundless resources manifest themselves beyond the brick and mortar, players and coaches say. A standard of excellence imbues the entire organization and can be felt across the headquarters' 26-acre campus.
“It’s just so much bigger,” said Broncos offensive line coach Zach Strief, who played and coached for the Saints for 14 seasons. “I love New Orleans and the people of that organization, but security at the Saints is (director of security) Danny Lawless. The security here is a team of 12 people. And you feel those resources.”
In Denver, Payton has employed a similar game plan to rebuild the Broncos to the one he used to build the Saints into perennial playoff contenders. The challenge is not as daunting as the one he encountered in post-Katrina New Orleans, but it remains difficult. Before he arrived, the Broncos had suffered six consecutive losing seasons and not made the playoffs since 2015. Those streaks were the longest in decades.
“I love the job, but there’s no utopia,” Payton said. “If the job’s open, there’s a reason. Even with great ownership here, great tradition here, all that, man, there were challenges roster-wise. But there's a fun challenge to that, too, that is exciting.”
And he’s not tackling it alone. Familiar faces abound. To facilitate the transition, he’s recruited an army of coaches, players and executives from his Saints tenure to join him. In all, 11 coaches, eight players and three former Saints executives have followed Payton from New Orleans to Denver, among them Strief, offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, strength and conditioning coordinator Dan Dalrymple and senior offensive assistant Pete Carmichael, who was fired in January after two seasons as Saints offensive coordinator.
As he did in New Orleans, Payton has remade the roster with smart, physical, football-obsessed players. To “callous” them for the demands of a 17-game NFL schedule, he's run physically demanding workouts and practices. And he’s employed familiar motivational tactics to reinforce his coaching maxims and steel them for the journey ahead.
The walls of the locker room and training facility are adorned with signs, displaying favorite sayings from the likes of Bill Parcells, Chuck Daly and Avery Johnson. Former players and alumni have been invited to the facility in an effort to embrace the team’s rich heritage. He even welcomed country music star Kenny Chesney for a recent practice visit, a regular occurrence with the Saints.
And as Payton did often with the Saints, he's used visual aids to buttress his message at team meetings. Earlier this year, he showed the team a video of an interview with Hall of Fame safety Ed Reed, who told interviewer Joe Buck how he lectured teammates in 2003 about cleaning up the used towels and discarded athletic tape in the locker room after practice. It was Reed’s version of the Broken Windows theory, and it became part of the legend of the Ravens’ 2003 Super Bowl run.
“There's a lot of good football coaches that can coach scheme and all that stuff, but there's something else about having a personality that can motivate and lead a building full of alphas,” Strief said. “That’s Sean’s superpower.”
Added Carmichael: "His leadership is amazing. He's got a special gift that when he talks to you, you walk away thinking, I want to run through a wall (for him)."
In small ways, though, Payton has evolved since leaving New Orleans. In perhaps a nod to turning 60 in December, he’s slowed down a bit — literally and figuratively. He recently had cataract surgery and is taking heart medication twice monthly as a preventative measure. When I visited him in early August, he limped slightly around the practice field because of a balky knee that eventually will require surgery. He’s discarded the ubiquitous visor he wore in New Orleans for a traditional baseball cap at practices and games.
He’s also learned to delegate responsibilities more often. The back of the name plate on his desk says, "Just coach your team." He also keeps a quote from James Clear’s best-selling book “Atomic Habits” on his phone: “The highest level of mastery is simplicity. Most information is irrelevant and most effort is wasted, but only the expert knows what to ignore.”
“You get wiser relative to how you burn your battery,” he said. “There's certain things that I exhausted maybe too much energy on when I was younger.”
Otherwise, though, Payton remains the same defiant, swashbuckling dissident he was in New Orleans. He still enjoys sparring with reporters in press conferences and tweaking the NFL when prodded. The intense Sunday Sean gameday personality revealed itself last season when he engaged in a fiery sideline confrontation with quarterback Russell Wilson during a tough loss in Detroit.
“I don't think Sean has changed at all,” Strief said. “Sean has high expectations of everyone that is near him: staff, players, everyone in the building. He's unwavering in that expectation.
“I think that year off kind of re-energized him. We got here, and we're at the bottom of this mountain and have a long way to go, but there’s some juice and some excitement to it that maybe wasn’t exactly the same his last year in New Orleans.”
There are other reasons Payton is so happy in Denver. Broncos general manager George Paton js cut from a similar cloth as Loomis, whose measured approach, modest personality and calculated managerial style allowed Payton to blossom in New Orleans. And logistically, Denver is a short plane flight to his offseason home in Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and to Los Angeles, where his daughter, Meghan, works as an analyst for FanDuel TV. Payton and his wife, Skylene, live about 5 miles from team headquarters in Denver’s tony Cherry Creek neighborhood, where crime is rarely an issue.
Payton relayed a story about his final season in New Orleans, when he was followed home by a suspicious car after one late-night game-planning session. In the early morning hours along the desolate side streets near his Uptown home, the car tailed him all the way to his garage. He eluded the potential car jackers only by bypassing his home and driving to the emergency room of a nearby hospital, where 24/7 security detail was present.
The incident unnerved Payton, but he emphasized it wasn’t the impetus for his hiatus.
“It was time for a break,” he said. “I just needed to get away.”
At the time, he had no idea how much time he would need. He said a one-year sabbatical was not an option — or a fair one to the team — because he didn’t know how long it would take to recharge his batteries. But after a year of work as an NFL analyst at Fox Sports, he was ready to coach again.
“There’s only so many days you can walk the dog and get coffee,” he said. “I’m in my coaching prime.”
While he left New Orleans two years ago, the city remains close to his heart and very much a part of his daily existence.
A corner of his office is decorated with mementos from his Saints days: photos of Will Smith, Reggie Bush, Drew Brees surround a framed copy of the play sheet from Super Bowl XLIV. Next to it hangs a framed page from the Times-Picayune, documenting his 2006 hiring as Saints head coach and bearing the headline “Payton’s Philosophy: Attention to Detail.”
Broncos officials kiddingly note that he can’t get through a post-practice press conference without at least one reference to Drew Brees, Marques Colston or Alvin Kamara.
And while he’s too busy with his own team to keep abreast of the Saints’ doings — “Is Mike Thomas still with them?” he asked at one point — he maintains contact with general manager Mickey Loomis, whom he considers his best friend in the league. He’s kept his condo in the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown New Orleans and returns to the city 2-3 times each offseason. Payton played golf with Loomis and other Saints officials earlier this summer and flew to New Orleans from the NFL Scouting Combine with Loomis and head coach Dennis Allen to attend the wedding of a mutual friend. He also contributed a sizable donation to Gayle Benson’s restoration efforts at St. Louis Cathedral.
“New Orleans will always be home,” he said. “I miss the people, but it’s not just one tangible thing. I spent 16 years there, longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere in my life. I’ll always have a place there, even after I’m done (coaching).”
Retirement, though, is a long way off. He has work to do in Denver first.
The Broncos improved by three wins in his first season, but the roster remains a work in progress. He’s as enamored with rookie quarterback Bo Nix as he was Drew Brees and Taysom Hill, and he’s seen some similarities between this year’s seven-man draft class to the foundational 2006 class he had in New Orleans.
While he loves the potential and competitive nature of this year's team, he knows he won't truly know what it's made of until the inevitable adversity strikes.
“I like this team,” he said. “It’s young and hungry. And young and hungry is kind of dangerous, you know what I mean? But it takes work. It's like parenting kids. It takes energy and effort, and it's fun. I'm right in that turn right now.”
If Payton succeeds this season, he will do so against the odds and conventional wisdom of the NFL cognoscenti. The Broncos are the consensus pick to finish last in the AFC West Division. Vegas oddsmakers, meanwhile, have made them the fourth-longest shots to win the Super Bowl at 150-1, the lowest odds in Broncos franchise history, and set their over-under win total for the season at 5½.
But if we’ve learned anything about Payton over the years, it is that he is most dangerous when discounted. He faced an even more difficult situation when he took over the Saints in 2006, and we know how that turned out.
“I love being the underdog,” he said. “The next time I only win six games in a season will be the first.”
