Sean Payton shockingly stepped away from the New Orleans Saints following their 9-8 season in 2021. How will the home crowd react upon his return? It was an abrupt and brief retirement for Sean Payton, who at the time saw his starting QB in Jameis Winston go down with a torn ACL.
The Saints managed to win nine games in the 2021 NFL Season but did not make the playoffs. After that, Payton and the Saints held a press conference, and during the 2022 NFL Season, he was not coaching in the NFL. During that year off, Payton was still making a plethora of media appearances and was very much still around the game.
And I suppose he simply needed a year off to recharge a bit. Well, during the head coaching cycle heading into the 2023 NFL Season, the Denver Broncos ended up swinging a trade to acquire Sean Payton. Over a year later, the franchise that Sean Payton built will get to welcome him back to New Orleans.
How will the Saints crowd react to Sean Payton's return?
You could argue that part or most of the crowd would actually boo Payton - if you're in the camp that he quit on the Saints, then I guess booing him is warranted.
However, the Saints were a marvelously irrelevant franchise before Payton arrived, and in year four, he brought their lone Super Bowl to the city. The Saints were an exceptional team save for the 2014-2016 seasons where their defense was among the worst in the NFL. They went 7-9 in all three of those seasons before again putting themselves on the map beginning in 2017.
A ton of heartbreaking moments in the playoffs had the Saints consistently falling short in the postseason. And as those years were happening, the Saints' cap situation was becoming more and more dire, and the team is now at a point where they simply have to rip this thing down to the studs and embrace a full-scale rebuild.
I have a feeling that a huge reason why Sean Payton wanted to leave New Orleans was that he wanted to begin something new and also did not want to eventually have to deal with trying to repair the Saints' broken cap situation.
Now with the Denver Broncos, he's overseeing his third rebuild as an NFL head coach and has the Broncos sitting just outside the NFL playoffs at a 3-3 record with a rookie QB. By all accounts, Denver's own rebuild is going in the right direction, and after coaching the Saints for nearly two decades, he'll return to the building he called home for so long.
How will the Saints' crowd receive Sean Payton?