A win away from surpassing mentor, Broncos’ Sean Payton still shaped by Bill Parcells’ lessons

Light rain turned heavy the afternoon of Feb. 1, 2010, the start to that week’s Super Bowl festivities in Miami clouded by a gloomy grey fog. The New Orleans Saints, marching into town with a parade of Louisiana faithful behind them, were set to practice at the Miami Hurricanes’ outdoor facility. They needed to move indoors that Monday.

Sean Payton had his pick of locations, as former linebacker Scott Shanle remembered. The Saints settled on the Dolphins’ facility, then located at Nova Southeastern University. It was some 25 miles north of Miami’s campus.

But Bill Parcells was there.

The Big Tuna, then the Dolphins’ executive VP of football operations, watched that Monday as his pupil’s creation rolled in. Fresh off three years as Parcells’ offensive coordinator in Dallas, Payton went to New Orleans for his first head-coaching gig in 2006 to a franchise in the mud and a city rebuilding from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. He built a locker room of self-dubbed “castoffs and butts,” as linebacker Scott Fujita said. Three years later, they were playing for a Lombardi Trophy.

Parcells, one of the most legendary coaches in NFL history, was rarely one for heaping affection. But he pulled Shanle and Fujita aside — two linebackers who wound up playing for Payton in New Orleans after playing for Parcells in Dallas — and told them he was proud. And Shanle remembers he and Payton talking, almost as a passing of the torch.

“It almost felt like it was a chance for Sean to show off his team a little bit,” Shanle recalled. “And it was a ‘I wanna make you proud’ moment.”

For years to come, after the Saints brought that Super Bowl home to New Orleans and Payton developed his own titanic status in the NFL, he still leaned on his mentor. At times, Shanle and Fujita would turn to each other in Saints meeting rooms and raise an eyebrow. That sounds familiar. Payton would sometimes tell his team — in some variation — that he “spoke to Parcells,” or that “Bill said this is how we need to attack.”

In Denver, where the 61-year-old Payton is knee-deep in his next rebuild, a Parcells quote hangs prominently in the hallway of the team’s facility in Dove Valley. Don’t ever let good enough be good enough, it reads.

Now, as the Broncos head to Philadelphia on Sunday for one of the defining matchups of the early Payton Era, he stands a single game away from passing Parcells in all-time career head-coaching victories. They are tied at 172 wins, now, after the Broncos beat the Bengals on Monday night. It was enough to choke Payton up at the dais, recognizing the significance.

“He’s a pretty big influence on what I’ve been able to achieve,” Payton said.

And Payton, now, will attempt to win a game to climb past the man who taught him the art of winning.

“To surpass him in wins?” said former Chargers head coach Anthony Lynn, who coached under Parcells and Payton in Dallas in 2005.

“That’s some prodigal-son (expletive), right there.”

Still, Parcells and Payton talk frequently. Still, the lessons from his three years in Dallas form the genesis of who Payton is as a head coach.

Still, Parcells’ fingertips are everywhere, lingering on the fabric of Payton’s 2025 Broncos.

•••

Parcells taught Payton, in his own way, that there are multiple ways to win a football game.

In 2003, Dan Campbell hit free agency after beginning his NFL career under Payton’s offensive regime with the New York Giants. After Payton was hired in Dallas, he banged on the table for Parcells to bring in Campbell. A month later, once Campbell signed, Payton told the tight end that he couldn’t pass up the opportunity in his coaching career to learn from Parcells.

“Sean’s always been, man, a creative play-caller, a creative game-plan designer,” said Campbell, later an assistant for Payton in New Orleans and now the head coach of the surging Detroit Lions.

“But I think what he really learned under Bill were those things — the psyche of the game, how you truly go in to win a game,” Campbell continued. “They’re not all the same. They’re all different. And I thought that really elevated Sean as a coach.”

In 2005, Payton’s final year in Dallas, the Cowboys ran a ball-control offense. Payton, however, was a high-volume coach. In the shadows, he and running backs coach Lynn would stealthily slip a few extra concepts into the weekly game plan. Eventually, the call-sheet grew to roughly 65 plays.

Then Parcells came by one day.

“I know what you little (expletives) are doing,” Parcells told them, as Lynn remembered. “Take those extra plays out.”

“He always said, ‘Coordinators with a lot of volume are insecure — don’t be an insecure coordinator,’” Lynn recalled. “And I think that was kind of the case. We didn’t feel like we had enough bullets.”

A few weeks later, the Kansas City Chiefs’ high-powered attack came to town, led by quarterback Trent Green and All-Pro running back Larry Johnson. Parcells recognized his Cowboys needed to go blow-for-blow. So he summoned Payton and Lynn.

“He goes, ‘Hey, you know that stuff I said about not having enough plays, and having too many plays, and being insecure?’” Lynn recalled. “He goes, ‘To hell with all that. Throw the whole kitchen sink at ‘em. I want every frickin’ trick play we have.’”

The Cowboys won a shootout, 31-28.

Two decades later, Payton lives on both extremes of that same spectrum. He is one of the league’s most notorious personnel-shifters — at times confounding both opposing defensive coordinators and his own offenses — and one of the league’s quickest to pull tricks from the sleeves of his hoodie. Sometimes he fires too many bullets, like in the Broncos’ Week 1 win over the Titans, when Payton called a go-ball on a fourth-and-8 that didn’t hit and gave Tennessee the ball back. Sometimes he connects, like on the wheel route he dialed up to a wide-open RJ Harvey for the final score against Cincinnati.

He can also be ruthless with sheer simplicity: wearing the Titans down in Week 1 and the Bengals down in Week 4 with a two-headed run game of Harvey and J.K. Dobbins.

“Bill used to say that all the time — ‘Are you paying attention to how the game’s being played?’” Payton recalled after that Week 1 win. “That may impact how you call a game, on either side of the ball.”

•••

Parcells taught Payton, in his own way, how to push buttons.

There were three ways to stay out of the Parcells doghouse. Know what to do. Execute. And don’t get hurt often. Failing any of the three meant opening oneself to a specific kind of wrath from a man who, as Fujita put it, could “look right through you and make you feel about two inches tall.”

In that same vein, Parcells knew how to snip external narratives and twist them into barbs within his own facility. Campbell remembers Parcells putting up a swarm of hand-drawn signs around the building.

NFL stands for Not For Long. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. 

And, of course, there’s an all-time Parcells metaphor, which Payton took and ran with in New Orleans. Players and coaches would walk in on a game week and occasionally see mousetraps cocked and ready in the corners of the facility.

The message was simple. And not entirely subtle. If the locker room was riding high, or if the team was favored heavily against a particular opponent, Parcells would whip out the mousetraps. Payton would do the same with his Saints. Daring someone, as Lynn put it, to “bite the cheese.”

“He was huge,” Shanle said of Payton, “on Don’t Take the Cheese Week.”

Eventually, the Padawan became a “master manipulator” in his own right, as Fujita put it. Sometimes, in New Orleans, Payton would put gas cans in veterans’ lockers and ask if they had enough gas left in the tank, as Shanle remembered. Once, before a game against the St. Louis Rams (now Los Angeles) and star running back Steven Jackson, Payton poked his head into the linebackers’ meeting room.

“I’m just making sure none of the linebackers,” Payton said, “have the Steven Jackson Flu this week.”

“He always just found a way that pissed you off a little bit,” Shanle recalled, “to get you to play your best.”

Last year, after Denver’s 227-pound rookie running back Audric Estime fumbled the rock on his first NFL carry, Payton taped two photos to his locker. One was a picture of elusive Lions great Barry Sanders. One was a picture of powerful Steelers great Jerome Bettis.

The picture of Sanders had a circle around it with a red line slashed through.

“He demanded respect, and everybody respected him,” said Campbell, who coached under Payton from 2016-2020 in New Orleans before taking the head job in Detroit. “Doesn’t mean everybody liked him, but that didn’t matter. The respect was there, just like Parcells.

“And man, nothing went unnoticed,” Campbell continued. “Nothing went unnoticed. And sometimes I think that gets lost. It’s like, man — there’s a lot of young, promising coaches. But if you don’t deliver discipline, and you don’t demand excellence out of your players, well, you’re just spinning your wheels.

“And that is Sean’s superpower, man.”

•••

Parcells taught Payton, in his own way, to bring in players he could trust.

Over the course of four up-and-down years with the Cowboys, Parcells (34-30 in Dallas) restocked the locker room with long-in-the-tooth vets from his older days in a headset. In came wide receiver Terry Glenn, whom Parcells drafted seventh overall in 1996 with the Patriots. In came quarterback Drew Bledsoe, whom Parcells drafted first overall in 1993 with the Patriots. In came defensive lineman Jason Ferguson, whom Parcells drafted in the seventh round in 1997 with the Jets.

“I think the one thing Bill taught Sean is, you need to have your guys,” Shanle said.

After he was hired in New Orleans in 2006, Payton traded for Shanle and signed Fujita to yank two members of the Cowboys’ linebacker corps over to the Saints. He signed Campbell as a free agent in 2009 and signed former Dallas starting running back Julius Jones in 2010. Since arriving in Denver in 2022 after a one-year coaching hiatus, Payton’s pulled former allies from his days in New Orleans: kicker Wil Lutz, defensive tackle Malcolm Roach, tight end Adam Trautman.

“It’s a badge of honor to be a Parcells guy, or to be a Payton guy,” Shanle said.

Shanle, who is now an analyst on New Orleans’ “Saints Gameday Live,” watched Payton’s Broncos clobber the Saints 33-10 last October. He watched a group, still playing without many expectations, that was fundamentally sound and rarely in the wrong spot. He watched a group that didn’t beat itself and felt a growing sense of deja vu.

After that Broncos win, Shanle talked with Zach Strief, a former teammate with the Saints and now Payton’s offensive line coach in Denver.

“Man, you guys took the formula to Denver,” Shanle told Strief.

This formula now drives the makeup of successful Payton teams: Smart. Tough. Gritty.

It was the identity of his 2006 New Orleans Saints, who went from 3-13 in 2005 all the way to an NFC Championship Game appearance. It was the identity of his 2024 Broncos, who roared to a surprise Wild Card berth. Time will tell if it’s the identity of this ’25 team in Denver, carrying a 2-2 record and a heap of mental mistakes into a massive game in Philadelphia.

“There’s a certain type of player profile that Sean Payton wants,” Shanle said. “And he knows exactly what he’s looking for.

“And that same type of player profile is a Bill Parcells player profile.”

Where Sean Payton stands

Sean Payton is a win away from surpassing Bill Parcells for total wins as an NFL head coach. While he’s still got a long way to go before reaching the top five, he and several current head coaches are slowly moving up the ladder. 

Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com | + Inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame | Current head coach in bold.

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