Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton volunteered to coach flag football against Team USA, and he said it was "humbling."
Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton can be fun to cover for any number of reasons, and one of them is his penchant for creativity. The man has serious skills, and his recent experience coaching the Founders FFC team as part of the Fanatics Flag Football Classic recently brought it out in a big way.
Founders FFC got trounced twice by the existing USA team, and Payton’s initial comments were about whether NFL players will be able to make the transition to flag football.
"I think when this first was announced, there was this feeling there would be 10 NFL players on that roster," Payton said while speaking to reporters at the NFL owners meetings in Arizona in a piece written by Kevin Seifert of ESPN. "And I'll be surprised if there's one.”
The problem, Payton quickly discovered is that flag football is a completely different sport. Fellow coach Kyle Shanahan compared it to playing five-on-five on a tennis court, and Payton talked about “getting skinny” and being shifty as necessary skills to avoid flag pulling.
But the real problem, he concluded, was training, which would have to be completely different for NFL players.
“I think we have plenty of players that can acclimate, but it's going to take a month or two,” Payton added. “And then if you're one of those players, do you have that month or two? And if you're training for that, you're not training [for NFL football]?”
There are plenty of bear traps in the process, too, as Payton and his flag football defensive coordinator, Jim Harbaugh, also discovered. (As an aside, has there ever been an odder coaching pairing than Payton and Harbaugh?) NFL owners approved a policy last year to permit players to try out for the US team, albeit with a limit of one per NFL squad. Many NFL players have expressed interest, but in that event they wound up on the wrong end of a mismatch.
Payton called it “humbling,” then compared the experience to watching “Home Alone” and the sequence of sequels that followed that movie.
“You remember the Home Alone series, and [actor] Macaulay Culkin was inside?” Payton began. “Well, Macaulay Culkin was the international team and I felt like [defensive coordinator Jim] Harbaugh and I, were the two guys outside getting hit in the head, tripping over the garden hose. It's an entirely different game."
Payton does have some current players who would probably do well if they could figure out how to navigate the training conundrum. It’s easy to imagine small, shifty backs like Jaleel McLaughlin and Tyler Badie adapting well to flag football because of the nature of their athletic skill set, and the same logic would probably apply to receiver/return man Marvin Mims Jr.
It’s a fun exercise to play with any number of similar NFL players at the skill positions, but another thing that would make it a great fit is doing it in their mid-thirties or when they’re fortyish after they’ve retired. That wold solve the training issue, and they’d probably be far more athletic than at least a few of the players on the US team.