Sean Payton’s first year in his second stint as a head coach didn’t go well. It has attracted plenty of criticism of the Super Bowl-winning coach.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Payton was asked whether he has a chip on his shoulder due to the national conversation about his coaching.
“I think that I have two middle fingers,” Payton said. “I’ve gotten better with age not using them. I think it’s more — and I would say this changed for me — it’s more inward focused relative to our own team and what we’re doing. As you get older in this, you don’t waste the calories on certain things that I might’ve back in 2006, ’07, ’08.
“I don’t play a lot of video games, but you have ‘X’ amount of battery life and energy, and you try to use it where you think it’s best going to help the team. So you learn over time to not spend as much on the things you can’t control, certainly lists. If that concerned me, we wouldn’t have drafted Bo Nix where we selected him, if I was paying attention to that. That’s that ‘NFL train’ that no one knows who’s driving, and you have to pay attention to it, but you don’t want to hop on it or you just start making decisions. . . . And we still don’t know who’s driving, it’s just going. Really paying attention to your gut, your experience and what you’re seeing. Those are the things that drive me now.”
It’s the right attitude. When a team is doing well, the coach gets praised. When it isn’t, the coach gets criticized. Payton will keep getting scrutiny until the Broncos become AFC West contenders, for the first time since they won the Super Bowl to cap the 2015 season.
