Mickles: Payton could have been Davis' victim

• By SHELDON MICKLES
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Oct 12, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:37 a.m.

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Sean Payton didn’t have to be reminded this week that he could have been on the other sideline today when his New Orleans Saints face the Oakland Raiders in the Superdome.

Then again, considering Raiders owner Al Davis has hired — and fired — four head coaches since they went to the Super Bowl in 2002, there’s a pretty good chance Payton would have been long gone by now.

In January 2004, Payton, then an assistant with the Dallas Cowboys, interviewed twice with Davis for the Raiders’ top coaching job and almost accepted a four-year contract—which is, in effect, a one-year contract.

But on second thought, he decided to remain on Bill Parcells’ staff and eventually got the Saints job two years later.

“I had gone through the process right after the ’03 season, and we had a pretty good season that year in Dallas,” Payton said Thursday. “After that first interview, I felt like it was going to be something that could happen — and I was certainly interested in it.”

Things changed for Payton, however, after a second interview and a talk with his wife and friends when he flew back to Dallas.

“Up until the very end, it was something I saw happening,” Payton said. “It was a gut decision to stay and try to finish the work we had begun in Dallas. We had just gotten there — we had only been there less than a year — and I ended up staying. But the experience for me in visiting with Al Davis was invaluable.”

As more and more teams experiment with a direct snap to a running back instead of the more conventional snap to the quarterback, Payton was asked if he might expect that from the Raiders considering Darren McFadden did it quite well at Arkansas the last couple of years.

“It’s an aspect you have to practice against and game-plan accordingly,” Payton said. “It’s just one more aspect of something that you have to defend. You have to devote part of your practice to that because that aspect in itself is a challenge. Whether they run it or not is another thing.”

Payton said Saints fans won’t be seeing it any time soon, not with Drew Brees completing 68.6 percent of his passes for a league-high 1,673 yards.

“I don’t think it’s something for us right now based on our personnel,” he said with a smile. “I’d prefer to snap it to Brees as many times as we can.”