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ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — How do you whittle down 15 years’ worth of stories about the Hall of Fame quarterback with whom you set countless records and hoisted a Lombardi Trophy into a 10-minute window?
Sean Payton did it by sitting down for hours with the Hall’s ceremony producers on a June morning inside the Denver Broncos’ training facility to describe his time in New Orleans with Drew Brees, who will officially be inducted as a first-ballot Hall of Famer next weekend in Canton, Ohio.
And then, at his own request, Payton did it again in the afternoon.
“There’s a series of questions and statements for you (to respond to) as they put it together, and your fear is it’s not going to be good enough or complete enough; at least that’s how I felt,” Payton said Thursday. “But (the producers) were here the whole day and I asked if they were going to (still) be there after (minicamp) practice. I said, ‘OK, I’m going to come back and put the coat and tie on, and I want you to do the whole thing over again. (The producer) asked me why. I said, ‘I just know if we do the whole thing over again, there’s going to be certain answers that are different that you reflect on. So after practice we went back for another three hours because there’s that feeling: ‘Is it good enough?’”
Payton’s commitment to his role as Brees’ presenter, spending hours on a project that will be condensed into a 10-minute video that will precede the quarterback’s speech, helps explain the emotions that dashed through the 62-year-old coach when Brees asked him to present him at the Hall of Fame in April. Payton’s eyes watered as he took a FaceTime call from the quarterback while awaiting dinner at a restaurant. His voice caught in his throat. A decade and a half of memories came dashing back. The Saints’ first — and still only — Super Bowl after the 2009 season. The games where Brees rendered his own punter’s job obsolete. The days where it was hard to remember the ball ever hitting the ground.
“I can’t believe you just did that” 🥹@DrewBrees asks @SeanPayton to present him at the @ProFootballHOF
🎥: @GregBensel pic.twitter.com/GKJniyiJLj
— New Orleans Saints (@Saints) July 30, 2026
“He’s one of the only players, when he played, it almost looked like Madden,” Payton said of the popular NFL video game.
The memories that surged to the forefront for Payton in that moment, though, were the quieter ones. The ones that helped explain how a coach and a quarterback arrived in New Orleans in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and turned the franchise into a winner.
Payton on Thursday recalled a post-practice scene during one of the duo’s early seasons together, after the Saints had made the cuts to get down to their initial 53-man roster. Brees gathered the team in a huddle before games throughout his career and led players in a rousing chant that became synonymous with their rise to championship contenders. The quarterback needed time with the team after that cut-down-day practice, though, to rehearse the chant so that it would flow freely on game days.
“So I said, ‘What is it?’ He kind of gave it to me, and I said, ‘Do it one more time,’” said Payton, who coached Brees from 2006 to 2021 with the Saints and has been the head coach in Denver since 2023. “So he did it again, and I said, ‘Are our guys going to be able to get all that?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, they will get it.’ He had that rare trait of bringing out the best in everyone. That was a gift.”
In Payton’s role as presenter, he’ll hand Brees his gold jacket in a ceremony on Friday, Aug. 7. Then, Payton and a handful of Denver assistant coaches who also worked with Brees in New Orleans will be at the front of the crowd as the quarterback’s bronze bust is revealed.
Payton could one day join his quarterback in Canton. That would almost certainly be the case if he leads the Broncos, who lost in the AFC Championship Game last season, to a title and becomes the first coach in NFL history to lead two different franchises to a Super Bowl victory. The success for both is inextricably linked.
“The 15 years, it’s just a long time and a lot of hours,” Payton said. ” … A lot of times, for a number of reasons, those quarterback-head coach relationships, you kind of always take for granted, yet a lot of times they don’t end like you’d want them to end,” Payton said. “I was really proud that it ended the way he wanted it to.”
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