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Yet honestly, before a season ever starts, you don’t know how it’s going to end up. In ’06, I would have told you we were only gonna win three games, and we went to the NFC championship game. And our schedule was a tough one. We had the AFC East—the Patriots, the Dolphins, who had just won their division, the Jets and Buffalo. That’s a strong division. And we had the NFC East—Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Those were arguably two of the better divisions in our game.

With Williams finally on board, we opened well against Detroit at home, 45-27. Then we went immediately to Philadelphia to play the Eagles. This game was the game that really put us on a roll.

In four years, we had played the Eagles three times—twice by schedule and once in a play-off game. All those games were in the Superdome.

But having coached in Philadelphia, I know something about Eagles fans. This ’09 game was maybe my eighteenth time preparing to play in Philadelphia. Andy Reid is excellent. The Eagles are extremely well coached, the most successful team in the NFC over the past ten years. And going into Philadelphia is the antithesis of going to a place like Green Bay with all their bratwurst hospitality. The Philadelphia welcome to a visiting football fan is more like: “We really don’t fuckin’ want to see you on game day.” It’s even worse for an away team that has come to Philly for a game.

I warned the players a week before the game.

“This is gonna be a little different for some of you who haven’t been to Philadelphia before,” I said. “The four buses are gonna come off the highway. We’ll do a loop around the stadium. As we come back to the basketball arena and we’re getting closer to the Linc [the Lincoln Financial Center], we will pass a group of tailgaters. A large group of tailgaters. A big parking lot. And I promise you, bus number one is getting at least four eggs. Now bus number four, you might get more. But I promise you, bus one’s getting four eggs.”

I explained a bit of what I had learned while coaching in Philly and playing there over the years. And I’d lived there a few years as a kid. We lived in Newtown, Pennsylvania, from the time I was seven until I was thirteen. Before we moved to Naperville, which I still consider home, we were outside Philly. So I knew something about the history and the local temperament.

“These people are masters at being miserable,” I said. “These are the people who boo Santa Claus.”

I made a prediction: “It’ll start with the eggs being thrown at the buses,” I told the team.

“But I’ll say this: There’s no more gratifying city to win in on the road than Philly. And after we win this game, we’re gonna take two laps around the stadium on our buses before we head to the airport because we can’t get enough of people pissed off at us and flipping us the bird.”

Now, as a coach, there is nothing better than telling your players something is going to happen, and then it happens just like you said. You gain instant credibility with the team.

So sure enough, we pulled around the corner, and here’s the parking lot and there are the tailgaters and—
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Five eggs.

“Coach! Coach!” the players were shouting.

“What did you think? I was lying to you?” I asked.

Two of the eggs were thrown by what must have been a nine-year-old boy. And his father was holding the carton. Learned behavior, I believe this is called.

So we pulled around. We went into the stadium. We played a close game in the first two quarters. It was 17-13 at the half. And then we really pulled away. It was a big win for us: 48-22. On the road against Philly! That was a huge win for us.

We’re back in the locker room. We gave away the game ball. We showered. We got on the buses. And I told the driver, “Two laps around the stadium.”

We only got one.

The motorcade that was taking us to the airport, they were Philly. The police escort, Philly. I told the players, “If you didn’t recognize somebody already, if you’re not used to seeing them Monday to Friday, they’re Philly.” And all these Philly people, they take their losses very personally.

They were not about to give us a double chance to gloat.

We took one lap around the stadium. Then it was right out on the highway to the airport.

THERE IS NO TEAM
in this league that can’t beat you. You can never forget that.

We arrived in Buffalo after that big win in Philly. It was a game that you would look at on paper and say: “That’s a win. We should win that game.” And yet traveling to Buffalo is always a challenge. We had a crisis that week that developed and revolved around our defensive line.

We had a player who was late for a meeting—Bobby McCray. On Thursday, I called the team up and really challenged the defensive line. Will Smith, Charles Grant, Bobby McCray and the tackles. I really got after them, the idea that we’re not ready for this game. The response was a hard-fought game, but a win in which we played well defensively. I don’t know that the Bills had a first down in the second half.

So we were 3-0 with two road wins. Road wins are big in our league. No one was talking about a perfect season yet, but the term “big game” was being thrown around in the media. “This is gonna be a big game!”

Well, if you’re going to be a good team, you’ll be playing in lots of big games that are bigger than the one that was supposed to be a big game.

Week Four. The Jets in the Superdome. That was a big game. We fought and won another tough game. 4-0. The Giants were next. That was a bigger game. Like us, the Giants were unbeaten.

But we had a bye week before the game.

The bye week was an issue. In previous seasons, we had gone 0-3 in games immediately after a bye week. We just didn’t play well coming off a bye week.

That was casting a shadow over our preparation for the Giants game.

There’s a tent underneath the Dome where the players, the coaches and their families go to take a deep breath and relax after a game. We were in the tent after we beat the Jets. Everyone was asking how long the players would get off, what the bye schedule would be like. Drew and Brittany were talking to Beth and me.

Drew was lobbying for giving the guys a little more time off. Your instinct as a coach is not to want the players gone so long. But Drew made a good argument.

“Hey,” he said, “we haven’t played well with our current bye schedule. If we want to do something we’ve never done before, we’ve gotta do things we’ve never done before.”

I liked that. “If we want to do something we’ve never done before, we’ve gotta do things we’ve never done before.” That could apply to a lot of things around here.

Of course the wives both agreed with Drew. Three to one, I’m outnumbered here. Drew had a good pulse for where the players were.

We brought the players in for a day after the game and then got ’em outta there for four or five days straight. Took the rest of the week off. Normally, we would have brought them back on Wednesday. We didn’t get them back until the weekend.

We had a couple good practices on the weekend. Monday, we got a bonus day in.

Tuesday the players were off—normal routine—and here we got into our game week schedule.

Getting this rhythm right was important. The issue would come up again, twice in the postseason, at the start of the play-offs and before the Super Bowl. Both times, we had a weekend off. We couldn’t let that stall our momentum.

We played very well against the Giants. We did two things we had never done before: We changed the rhythm, and we won. That win gave us instant credibility because the Giants were perceived by many at that point in the season as the team to beat in the NFC.

They struggled later. But we beat a 4-0 team, beat them convincingly. And the way we won the game was significant. Gregg Williams was making a difference. We kept turning the ball over defensively. We were leading the league in team takeaways. Some people had been asking, “Is this just a fluke? Are the Saints as good as their record?” That was answered with that Giants win.

There wasn’t talk of a perfect season. Not yet. Not at 5-0. The talk was “You’re one of the players now in the NFC.” There was Philly. There were the Vikings, who were playing well at that point. There was a handful of teams being discussed. We were one of the four or five.

Week Seven was a road game in Miami. We were playing last year’s AFC East champion at home. They were well coached by Tony Sparano. We’d spent three years together in Dallas. It’s Parcells, and it’s a physical team. We fell behind immediately. Late in the second quarter, we were down 24-3. It was not a promising start, and it really was unexpected. Up to that point in the season, we had barely been behind at all. We hadn’t played from a deficit. We beat the Giants, and up until that point we’d been ahead in every game we’d played. Every one.

A play got reviewed and gave us the ball inside Miami’s one-yard line with just a few seconds left in the half. We were going to kick a field goal. But because of the challenge, there was a delay, and we didn’t score, so were gonna kick the field goal.

Drew says to me: “If we sneak it, Coach, I can get in.”

We were on the one-inch line. We had just enough time for him to convince me that we could run a quarterback sneak. If it worked, we’d cut their lead to fourteen points before the half.

Prior to the play, I ran down the sideline and told the line judge, “Hey, we’re gonna run a quarterback sneak. Make sure you see this ball cross the plane because he’s gonna cross the plane.”

Then I ran back to the bench area, because you’re not supposed to be down the line like that. And sure enough, Brees took the snap and extended the ball over and back, and it’s a touchdown. It was the right call.

We came back in the second half. We gained momentum. Sharper got an interception for a touchdown. We ended up winning that game. As poorly as we played in the first half, I don’t know that anyone felt we were out of it. But that was a key step in this unbeaten season: We found a way to win even when we didn’t play so well. We ended up winning 46-34. We got to 6-0. That was big.

The wins kept coming. We played a Monday night game at home against Atlanta. We had three interceptions and won 35-27.

Week Nine, we had Carolina at home and fell behind again. It was 14-0, and we were able to come back. At 8-0, people started noticing we hadn’t lost a game. At that point, we started battling not just our opponents but this whole idea of a season without a loss. Everyone started drawing attention to our record. And that can be a problem.

Perfect season? You never want your players to be reading these articles in the paper and hearing these discussions on TV.

You don’t want to ever lose sight of the process of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That’s the secret here: What we do on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. How we practice. How we compete. How we win. You don’t want anything—certainly not some hype in the media about how unbeatable you are—interfering with that.

When you listen to Patriots players talk about finishing the 2007 season 16-0, they’ll tell you: That last stretch of five or six weeks was a killer. Now you aren’t just worrying about this week’s opponent. You have the record hanging over your head. That can seep unintentionally into the locker room.

Thankfully, our team had good veteran leadership. They were committed to not letting that happen. So we beat Atlanta and Carolina, victories that got us closer to winning the division, our first goal.

As the season wore on, people were saying, “Well, they aren’t winning the same way they won earlier in the year.” St. Louis on the road was a hard-fought game. But if you paid close attention, Buffalo was a hard-fought win too—a close game in the third quarter. Miami was tough. The Atlanta game was close at home. The Carolina game, we were down by fourteen. St. Louis was a close game, and finished with them missing a Hail Mary to beat us.

Away games are an extra challenge. We’d won a handful, but that’s just not the nature of our game. Tampa Bay at Tampa, we won pretty convincingly, and that was a road game. So we moved to 10-0, and clearly, this unbeaten season now was being discussed—or at least the idea of remaining perfect.

To the media, we did everything we could to downplay that. “We’ve gotta prepare for the next game. That’s all we’re thinking about.”

Internally, the idea of a perfect season was discussed with the doors closed. “Just understand how we got to this point.”

There had been an important meeting early in the year that became relevant. Normally, we would put up the schedule for the players at the beginning of the season—the first four weeks—and talk about finding a way to handle the first quarter of the season. We’d hope to come out of it at least 3-1.

If you keep that pace going, you’ll finish 12-4.

But I remembered Brees and a few of the other captains saying, “Coach, when you put up the first quarter, let’s not concede any game. Let’s just look at the opponent.”

“All right,” I said. “I hear what you’re saying. We’re just gonna look at Detroit. Here’s the first four games, but Detroit is what we’re focused on. We’re not gonna talk about how we’ve got to win three of four here. It’s not like baseball, where a manager might say we’ve got to find a way to split here and then win the next two.”

And so after the first quarter of the season, it was 4-0. After the second quarter, it was 8-0. And into the third quarter, Tampa and New England were coming up.

Tampa Bay was a good win. But like the Giants game, New England was one of those incremental hurdles that turn up through the season that can validate your standing as the best in the NFC or a contender to win a championship. Coming back against Miami was important for our team. But New England was in a big spot. A good team with arguably one of the best quarterbacks in football. In that spot on Monday night, we played well again. Against a coach I truly admired.