When Broncos general manager George Paton boarded a plane for California in mid-January, he had never met Sean Payton.
Neither Denver’s sitting general manager nor the high-profile prospective head coach knew exactly what he was in for in getting to know the other. Flash forward less than three weeks later and their offices are now down the hall from each other and they are tasked, jointly, with leading the resurgence of a franchise that has suffered through seven consecutive playoff-free seasons. The most recent, of course, featured Paton’s first head coaching hire, Nathaniel Hackett, getting fired just 15 games into his tenure.
Now Payton and Paton are trying to get to know each other, quickly. Free agency is just a few weeks away and the draft soon after.
This football rendition of speed dating is not always going to be comfortable — both men recognized that Monday as Payton was introduced at a news conference at the team’s UC Health Center — but they also share enough background that they believe common ground may extend well past the already-worn carpet between their office doors.
“It’s easy to say the relationship has to be good, but it’s harder for the relationship to be good,” Payton said after telling a story about how his first game ever as a coach came as a 1988 graduate assistant for San Diego State against UCLA when Paton was a redshirt freshman there. “I felt really fortunate early on.”
More substantially, Paton worked in Minnesota for the entirety of Mike Zimmer’s head coaching tenure there. Zimmer and Payton are close thanks to the time they spent in Dallas working for Bill Parcells from 2003-05 before Payton became the head man in New Orleans.
The men in charge for Denver have diverse football experiences and mentors but enough interconnected football tissue to think that they will find that their styles work well as a pairing.
“I hear this myth that I’m this tyrant that has to come into the building and control everything,” Payton said. “Where are you guys getting all this stuff from? I might be a tyrant once in a while, but not a lot. I really enjoy his company and I think it works extremely well so far.”
Paton echoed that sentiment, saying that even in Los Angeles, when he met Payton at the front door of the hotel, “It was very easy. Just the conversation. I felt like throughout the interview we were aligned in how we want to build this. Like-minded. Then throughout the process a lot of follow-up calls, just between Sean and I.
“Then we hired him and brought him here and, shoot, I pick him up at the hotel at 6 a.m. and he’ll be here late in the evening.”
The new head coach even likened Paton to Mickey Loomis of the Saints, the only general manager he’s known as a partner, calling him, “very steady.”
If Monday’s show in the Broncos’ team auditorium was any indication, Payton and Paton grade out differently on personality tests. Payton, a television analyst at FOX for the past year, was telling stories well before his 13-minute opening statement concluded. He was in turns reflective and forward-looking — “You knock the rearview mirror off the automobile,” he said at one point. He was thankful and also willing to puff out his chest.
He showed no qualms about stepping back into the spotlight, in his own way acknowledging that, yeah, his hire here is a big deal and he knows it and he’s not running from it.
Paton fielded a question here and there but most of his presence Monday was in the credit he received from Payton and CEO Greg Penner for his behind-the-scenes work on the coaching search. He sat in on every interview. He helped guide Penner through a multi-week process that the Walmart chairman acknowledged was “very different” than finding an executive in the corporate world. He negotiated for several days with Loomis to make sure Payton ended up in Denver and to make sure that the Broncos didn’t have to pay too steep a price in draft picks.
Payton ribbed the general manager for not having a “Y” in his last name — “it looks like Patton,” he said — while the general manager smiled and shook his head.
While Paton played it straight when refuting an NFL Network report that the Broncos were trying to hire San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans as late as a few minutes before finalizing a trade for Payton, the head coach cracked a joke.
“I think DeMeco was probably talking with (Formula 1 racer and Broncos limited shareholder) Lewis Hamilton or something because I was on the phone with these guys the whole time,” he said.
So now the showman and the scout set about trying to build a roster and restore a winning culture. Paton made a remark Monday about the “honeymoon” phase and, like all marriages, this one will succeed or fail based on what happens after the wedding day cameras disappear, over the longer term, when adversity hits and disagreements arise, in good times and in bad.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Paton said. “But I do think we have similar philosophies and similar visions on how to build this team.”
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