Sean Payton Peaces Out
Well that was unexpected.
I wanted to make a comic about the overtime rules but couldn’t think of anything so that’ll have to wait for the offseason. Then out of nowhere, this happens! Sean Payton quit!
Payton really cut and run, didn’t he? We got one year without Brees, marred by injuries, covid, and hurricanes, and right as the team faces a major sea change due to cap problems, he retires out of nowhere. Dude got Taysom Hill paid 40 million and skipped town. It’s so bold I gotta respect it. Payton literally just had Kevin James play him in a movie, he’s got all the money he needs. Now he can walk away for a year or two and live the high life and sit by while the Saints finally face the repercussions of the crazy money deals they’ve been making for the past 5 years.
I definitely don’t think Payton is done. I think he’s pulling a Bruce Arians. Step away for a bit while things aren’t great and then when a highly desire job appears on the market (like the Cowboys, probably next year after McCarthy eats shit again), swoop back in and do it again. I hope he doesn’t come back, especially to a team like the Cowboys, and kinda just enjoys retirement. He’s the best coach in Saints history by about 700 miles and I don’t think he has anything left to really prove unless he really wants to ring chase. My man deserves his rest.
So now what will the Saints do? They weren’t supposed to be on the market for a coach, are getting the hiring process started fairly late, and honestly might not be the coveted destination they might have been a few years ago. They have no QB and are stuck in cap hell. They might get Jameis back, but Jameis is Jameis with all the negatives that come with the positives. I’ve seen Saints fans hoping Dennis Allen gets promoted and that makes sense to me. He has head coaching experience and has done well in New Orleans. My proposal: hire Kevin James as coach.
The NFC South is going to be very interesting soon. Ryan’s time with Atlanta is probably coming to a close and they are in the second year of a new regime and suck. The Panthers are a complete mess. The Bucs might re-sign Brady back, but the superteam is running on borrowed time and this year the injuries showed just how fragile it can be.
Enjoy the time off, Sean. Felt good to bring back my favorite character from the earliest days of the comic.
I really hope we get to see some Hobo Payton action.
Maybe Payton sleeping in a tent while a bunch of other HCs are sleeping in NFL team houses.
He was just stretching his calves on the windowsill. Isometric exercise!
Why is there smoke coming out of your salary cap?
Salary Cap, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely in your team?
can I see it?
Brady’s still under contract for 2(?) more years. It’s moreso a question of whether he decides to come back for one more go or quit while he’s still hot.
If he does retire, the 2022 NFC South has the potential to be onw of the worst divisions of all time. No Payton, No Brady. No particularly good team to take the mantle… Watch Atlanta go 15-2 and win the Super Bowl.
Last year, I would’ve said the Bucs would be just fine without Brady. But the core of the team is going to have to be broken up with free agency and cap issues.
Regardless of if he retires, Brady will not stay with the Bucs. He left the pats once the roster became unsustainable, and now he will leave the Bucs. A losing season would tarnish the mysticism around him, he cannot afford that.
I would say Colts look like a relatively likely landing spot, maybe Niners as well.
They would have been okay last year, but unless they were replacing Brady with another top flight QB like Mahomes or Rodgers, they wouldn’t have won the Super Bowl. Easy to forget they were 7-5 at one point last year with the whole team — Brady included — struggling mightily.
I honestly can’t see Brady trying to pull a stunt like this again. Joining a new team is extremely difficult and requires a lot of time, effort, and patience that Brady clearly doesn’t have at this stage of his career. If he decides that he no longer wants to play for Tampa (which is totally understandable), it’s a safe bet to assume that he’s going to retire. That being said, I’d love to see Brady finish his career with his hometown team in San Francisco. Would be perfect for him. I’m getting nauseous at the thought of him being a Colt though. Just no. Might be enough to make me hate the guy haha.
I’m sure Brady also recognizes – whether he’ll admit it publicly or not – how LUCKY they were last year. They squeaked by Heinicke and WTF, they were extremely fortunate to face Drew Brees coming back way too soon off broken ribs, and then after Brady threw 3 INTs in the 2nd half vs the Packers, Aaron Rodgers did his annual choke. I forget the stat, but Brady was the first QB in over 20 years to turn the ball over 3 times in the 2nd half of a game and still walk away with a W.
I think he recognizes his individual talent is not what it was – I don’t care how many times Arians had him throwing the ball, it became clear Brady was no longer a guy who could elevate the team around him. More than a couple of times this year, the team was basically forced to carry him, and I’m guessing he doesn’t want to further dilute his career and get exposed like when the Saints sent him into oblivion this season. This is the right time to retire, while he still looks like a competent QB.
That, and his family is forcing him to retire at gunpoint, I think. LOL
I wouldn’t say they were that lucky last year. Their benefit mostly came from the fact that they got to play 3 road games in empty or half-empty stadiums. On the field, the Bucs just caught fire at the right time and the whole team played excellent football on both sides of the ball down the stretch when it mattered. The only game they were really fortunate to win was against Green Bay, for the usual Rodgers choke and Matt Lafleur’s baffling late game management, but even then, Brady and the offense did all the damage they needed to in the first 35 minutes of game time. The defense just needed to hold on regardless.
I completely disagree with the second part of your take. It was often the complete opposite for most of the season. Brady was bailing them out of games they had no business winning. The secondary was already in shambles midway through week 1, and by midseason a lot of big names on both sides of the ball were either injured or battling injury. Brady was absolutely elevating the guys around him to the point that Cyril Grayson and Breshad Perriman became the primary playmakers by the end of the year and looked pretty good doing it. Not to knock Mike Evans, but going from him, Godwin and AB to him, Grayson, Perriman and whoever else they could find and not seeing any sort of drop off is due to them having a guy like Brady taking snaps.
That being said, I agree that this is absolutely the right time for him to call it quits. He goes out a dominant passer rather than a shell of himself like Manning, Brees, Roethlisberger and many others had before him. Given the instability and cap issues facing Tampa this offseason, there’s no reason to stick around and potentially damage his legacy, even if a losing season is perfectly acceptable given his laundry list of achievements.
Honestly I could see Brady viewing one last potentially bad season as both an earned indulgence and worthwhile gamble just to confirm whether there’s enough left in the tank.
Yeah. I don’t think Brady’s decision to retire is based in any concern over whether he can still play. The dude just threw for 5300 yards and 43 TDs. It just comes down to roster stability. Brady can still ball, but can this team still continue to win games alongside that? If the answer to that question is no, then there’s no reason to keep risking his body. His legacy is set in stone.
Can we get a rebooted version of Sean Payton year off
I like the king cake Superdome. Payton leaving right now seems very natural to me. I don’t know if he wants to go through a rebuild, or if he’s the bet guy to be there for it, but either way no coach with his resume would want to go through what the Saints are about to go through for at least a year or two.
The King Cake HQ with baby on top…absolutely perfect. Payton’s a great coach, but Taysom Hill is kinda his fault, and he’s ducking responsibility. I’d say the same about Sean McVay and Jared Goff though.
The alligators patrolling the swamp outside are a nice touch too.
Do you think Payton’s legacy is tainted at all by the bountygate thing?
Wait… is Sexy Rexy back???
Nice catch! That was always fun to spot in the comics
“I wanted to make a comic about the overtime rules but couldn’t think of anything so that’ll have to wait for the offseason”
Defense wins championships and if you can’t step up on D to stop that first drive on OT, you likely weren’t going to win in the next round anyway. But then again I’m sure the Chiefs weren’t going to be any better had the coin flipped the other way. Still, the defense deserved the pressure.
That’s not quite accurate. The late 4th quarter and overtime, the defense is going to be completely gassed and worn out. Especially in a game like that one and both defenses were beyond running on fumes at that point. They just aren’t going to be able to react in time and mistakes and blown coverages are more likely to occur. Whoever won the coin flip was in all likelihood going to win that game without the other being able to take the field.
Last I checked defence and special teams are part of the team. If your defence can’t keep up with the opposing offence you can’t claim to have deserved victory. You had 60 minutes of regulation to win, don’t complain if you can’t and then lose without getting a possession in overtime
The problem is that who gets the possession in overtime is random chance, and having the first possession in overtime is a MASSIVE advantage. If one team has to play defense and prove it, the other team should have to as well, because who got that chance wasn’t decided by play but by the flip of a coin.
The other team also had 60 regulation minutes to win and couldn’t do it, but now they get the advantage for no other reason than random chance. That’s what’s horseshit. In baseball, both teams get a chance to play offense and defense. In basketball and hockey, it is determined by tip off or puck drop, an actual play. If Hockey goes to shootouts, each team gets a chance to answer and the winner is determined when one scores and the other doesn’t. Football is the only sport where the one side of the ball doesn’t even get a chance if the other team scores first. It’s not an even system. That’s the actual problem none of you “well you gotta play defense” people seem to see. The flip of a coin should not have this much influence. If both teams failed to win in regulation, both teams should have to prove themselves in all facets to win in overtime.
I’ll go into it more when I make the comic, but my proposal is to eliminate the coin toss. Whoever gets the ball first in overtime should be determined by something else (like give the ball to whoever scored last), that actually gives teams a chance to influence it and have the advantage be organic. And both teams should be able to possess the ball at least once. If Team A scores a TD, that still puts a ton of pressure on team B, but it also still gives them a fair shot, and forces Team A to prove themselves as well.
I agree neither team deserves to win if the game is going to overtime, but in the playoffs there needs to be a winner and every play is a car crash. Whatever gives us a winner in the shortest amount of plays is what should be done and if it isn’t fair then boo hoo. Don’t let the game go to overtime then.
But games are going to go to overtime either way, so saying “well just don’t let overtime happen” is just ignoring the problem. Games are going to go to overtime, so make the overtime system not so influenced by random chance because both teams failed and neither deserves a random chance advantage for the same failure. The fact that getting the ball first in overtime is such a massive advantage and yet is dictated by something neither team has influence over is the root of the entire problem.
I’d be happy going back to sudden death if the team that gets the ball first is determined in a more organic way and we have to end the game faster. The advantage should be earned in some way.
I’m saying you don’t have a right to complain about not getting a fair shake if the game goes to overtime because as a team, you had a fair shake to avoid it and you didn’t. I’d much rather have an unfair overtime rule than players on contract years getting injured on the third overtime possession just to keep things “fair”
In the regular season the winner of the coin flip has won 53% of the time under the current rules, lost 41% of the time, and tied 6% of the time. It’s a modest advantage, and the overtime goal in the regular season is to get the game over with asap.
Totally different story in the playoffs – the winner of the coin flip is 10-1. Seems obvious different rules are needed in the playoffs.
Some good points were made. Why not have the ball positioned where it would have been at the end of the fourth? A transition football does from the 1st to 2nd and then 3rd to 4th quarters?
You could call OT “A new game.” But it does indeed favor the offense first on the field. If they’re disproportionately talented on that side of the ball like KC or Buffalo, the first team that touches the ball has a good shot to win.
I think if they change the rules this way it forces the D to step up while incentivizing the offense to continue to go for it, even if it is still tied up and they got like a 3rd and 15 at their own 20 yard line.
Keep the current OT rules outside of the coin flip. Ball stays where it last was.
I like it, but I’m not sure about keeping the OT rules fully. This may give a huge advantage to the team that had the ball (like if it was on the opponent’s 4 yard line) I think that regardless of the outcome of the first possession the other team should get a shot, but if after the second team’s possession is over the game is not tied it should end. Sudden death thereafter if it is tied, though.
Just some advice. Don’t google the king cake baby mascot that the other team in town uses. Unless you don’t want to sleep tonight.
I think this is a solid move if it is for metal health/family reasons. Coaching football is a job that takes over these people’s live (they go into it willingly and get paid well though). He’s got generational wealth and plenty of respect and accolades to cement himself as a great coach.
LEMME BE THE FIRST TO SAY FUCK YA GO BENGALS
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