Clearly exhausted from a late night of post-Super Bowl celebrations, Coach Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints leaned on a podium yesterday morning, clutching the Vince Lombardi trophy in his right hand.
"You can't get enough of this," Payton said at a news conference. "This thing lay in my bed next to me last night, rolled over it a couple of times. I probably drooled on it. But man, there's nothing like it."
Certainly, the New Orleans Saints never experienced anything like it. Before this one, the Saints had only two playoff victories in their previous 42 years combined. New Orleans had to win three postseason games over three great quarterbacks -- Kurt Warner, Brett Favre and Peyton Manning -- to win the title this season.
The last quarterback standing was Drew Brees, who joined Payton in 2006 with the idea of transforming the Saints into champions. That was easier said than done, but in their fourth season together, they did it. Brees was named Super Bowl MVP after Sunday night's 31-17 victory against the Indianapolis Colts. After that, his only remaining challenge was believing he'd actually pulled it off.
"I had to wake up this morning and turn to my wife and say, ‘Did yesterday really happen?' " Brees said. "Our victory last night was the culmination of four years of hard work, fighting through a lot of adversity, ups and downs and more importantly than that, representing a city that has been through so much," Brees said.
"Along the way, people have asked me so many times, ‘Do you look at it as a burden or extra pressure? Do you feel like you're carrying the weight of the city on your teams' shoulders.' I said, ‘No, not at all. We look at it as a responsibility.' Our city, our fans, gave us strength and we owe this to them.... There's no people that you would want to win for more than the city of New Orleans."
As Brees spoke, Payton sat off to the side, elbows on knees, face buried in his hands. When it was his turn to speak, he recounted Vince Lombardi's grandson, Saints assistant Joe Lombardi, posing for a photo with the sterling silver hardware bearing his last name.
"Joe Lombardi, his father, Vince Jr., and his two brothers sat and posed with this trophy, the four of them, while pictures were taken. And I just thought to myself, ‘You've got to be kidding me,' " Payton said. "If you believe in heaven, and you believe Vince Lombardi is there looking down on his grandson, it doesn't get any better."
Note: The Super Bowl was watched by more than 106 million people, surpassing the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H to become the most-watched program in television history. The Nielsen Co. estimated yesterday that 106.5 million people watched the New Orleans Saints upset the Indianapolis Colts. That beats the M*A*S*H finale, which had 105.97 million viewers in an era when there were fewer television sets. The game also obliterated the previous record viewership for a Super Bowl -- last year's game between Arizona and Pittsburgh, which 98.7 million people watched.
The Mid-Atlantic blizzard helped the CBS broadcast. After New Orleans, the highest-rated market was Washington, Nielsen said. More people watched the game from their homes in that area instead of going to bars, and Nielsen does a much better job counting viewers in homes than outside of them.
"Bad weather in the Northeast and good weather in Florida was a good combination for us," Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, said.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement