This past January 13, on the eve of a playoff game against the 49ers, New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams summoned the entire defence to a conference room in the team’s hotel near the San Francisco Airport. He stood in front of the crowd and in one of his final acts as a Saints coach—maybe as an NFL coach—he instructed his men to intentionally injure specific members of the 49ers offence. He told them to “kill the head” of running back Frank Gore. He told them to go after receiver Michael Crabtree’s knee, specifically his ACL. He told them to clip tight end Vernon Davis’s ankles. He told them to target the head of receiver Kyle Williams, who has suffered several concussions in his career. And, holding his hand in the air and rubbing his thumb against his index and middle fingers to signify the cash reward he was offering for the final hit, he told them to put their helmets into quarterback Alex Smith’s chin. “Lay that motherf—er out.”
Then he started handing out the envelopes. Williams read name-by-name off a list, followed by a dollar amount and what the player had done in the past weekend’s game to earn it. Anywhere from $200 to $2,000. Anything from an interception to knocking an opponent out of the game. As Williams distributed the cash, members of the Saints defence would taunt their teammates, shouting “give it back” over and over again, meant to encourage their co-workers to deposit the money back into the slush fund that financed the payouts, a pool that swelled to as much as $50,000 at times.
Williams had a long history of bizarre, rambling pre-game speeches that were often supplemented with crude PowerPoint presentations featuring motivational mantras and pictures of injured quarterbacks—examples of what the team should do to that weekend’s opponent. One slide in the presentation Williams used ahead of a 2011 playoff game against Seattle featured pictures of Seahawks quarterback Matt Hassellbeck, a shadowy figure in the crosshairs of a gun and reality television’s Dog the Bounty Hunter. At the bottom of the slide Williams wrote: “Now it’s time to do our job. Collect bounty $$$! No apologies. Let’s go hunting.” For three years—starting in 2009 when the Saints won a Super Bowl in emphatic and emotional fashion, inspiring a reeling city still struggling to overcome the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina—the Saints did business this way. And Drew Brees swears he had no idea.
Put yourself in Brees’s cleats. Six years ago you left a talented San Diego Chargers team to come to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and play for the Saints, a club coming off a 3-13 season played entirely on the road as their city sat under water. You immediately brought hope to a devastated community, leading your team and a rebuilding city all the way to the NFC Championship game in one of the most remarkable, compelling and uplifting seasons of football the NFL has ever seen. Away from the field you raised millions for hurricane relief efforts and donated $450,000 to replace a destroyed school. With your own two hands you helped rebuild some of the more than 100,000 homes that were lost in the storm. You left your mark on a community in ways few athletes ever have.
Then, as the Saints struggled through lean years in 2007 and 2008, surrounded by constant whispers of an impending relocation, you stuck it out. You played every single game and led the league in completions both years. You became just the second quarterback to throw for more than 5,000 yards in a season. You kept working, improving, building until 2009 when you threw two touchdown passes in the second half of Super Bowl XLIV to earn a come-from-behind victory, the first championship in Saints history. By 2011, you were the NFL’s best quarterback, setting league records for passing yardage and completion percentage. You were the dimpled, glabrescent face of America’s team. You were golden, man. Untouchable.
You know where this is going. This past March the NFL released 200 pages of evidence that said a lot of your teammates have been behaving very, very inappropriately. The league suspended eight players and coaches, including Williams, who was banned indefinitely, and your head coach, Sean Payton, who joined the Saints the same year you did but won’t be allowed near the team for an entire season. You immediately came out against the sanctions, filing an affidavit with a federal judge stating the league and its commissioner Roger Goodell got it all wrong. You criticized Goodell repeatedly in public and compared the league’s report on the Saints bounty program to the United States’ assertion that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction. You lost a lot of fans.
Suddenly, in spite of the goodwill you built up so diligently over the last half decade, people are asking questions. In the past you have voiced concerns about player safety and advocated for more concussion education in youth football players. But now you’re defending teammates who operated a pay-to-injure system? You’re the starting quarterback; how could you not know about this? There are players still on the Saints today who participated and benefited financially—$1,000 for a “knock-out,” $1,500 for a “cart-off”—from the bounty program but were never disciplined. Will there be no justice?
But you’ve stuck to your guns. You have to. You are Drew Brees and you have built a reputation as a genuine, reasonable, responsible human being. But your reputation is deeply intertwined with the reputation of the New Orleans Saints. If someone calls the Saints a dirty, thuggish team, they’re calling Drew Brees a dirty thug as well. The only way to clear your name is to clear your team’s name. It will not be easy.
Dragging this organization out of the mud and shifting public opinion back into the Saints’ favour rests on your shoulders. You took responsibility when the team struggled, you took the onus on yourself when the community needed help. Now you wear this, too.
he New Orleans Saints, for what it’s worth, will be a very good football team this season. They still have Brees, three running backs who could start on most teams, and a six-foot-seven, 265-lb. tight end no one could figure out how to stop last year. The suspensions of Jonathan Vilma and Will Smith will pose a challenge for the defence, but it’s not like the Saints were one of the NFL’s great shut-down teams a year ago when they went 13-3. The defence has always just had to be good enough, giving up somewhere under the 34 points the offence scores on average. It’s not an incredible stretch to imagine the Saints reaching the Super Bowl they will host this coming February in that symbolic stadium. And man, that’d be something.
In the meantime, most of their fans seem to have moved on, for better or worse. The Superdome is already sold out for the entirety of the regular season and the Saints season-ticket waiting list is thought to have as many as 50,000 names on it. So everything is as it was; Brees is again a hero in New Orleans, and on Sundays 76,468 people in black-and-gold will pack the stadium that once housed hurricane victims, screaming their lungs dry for the same men who participated in one of the NFL’s ugliest scandals. And if Brees can still throw at a prolific rate and the Saints can overcome the toughest sanctions the league has ever handed out to string some wins together, it will be like nothing ever happened. Brees does not need to make amends. He needs to win football games. For as wrong as Williams was in so many ways, he was at least right about one thing. “The NFL is a production business,” he said in front of his defence that January night in San Francisco. “Don’t ever forget it.”
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet Magazine.