Seth Wickersham: Why Sean Payton Is Giving Up Broncos’ Play Calling Duties

Seth Wickersham had access to Sean Payton's sleep scores. That detail alone tells you what kind of reporting this was.

"As the week went on, they were horrible," Wickersham told Rich, describing the week leading up to Denver's game against the Patriots.

What he witnessed was the Broncos spending an hour on a single play, sometimes multiple hours across multiple days. Payton is a night owl who gains steam as the night goes on, which meant 1:30 in the morning arrived with the meeting still running and the assistant coaches running on fumes.

"He nearly broke himself that week," Wickersham said.

The image that sticks is a Friday night, somewhere between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m., when Payton was likely the only coach working on that game anywhere, not just in the Broncos building but in New England, where it was two hours later. He was grinding tape, tired, hunting for two more red zone plays to run against zone coverage.

Wickersham wondered whether Payton was actually looking for plays or just chasing the feeling that the game plan was finished. Payton answered it himself before going home. This is therapeutic for me.

The punchline is brutal. One of the pivotal plays in that Patriots game was a fourth and one Payton called, and the Patriots surprised him by running the exact defense he had been preparing for that night. The Broncos did not get it.

"Those are the types of decisions that you live with as a coach," Wickersham said. "I think they get heavier and heavier and heavier as you get older and as you kind of accumulate scars."

Which is the bridge to the actual news, and to the word Rich could not get past. Payton is handing play calling to offensive coordinator Davis Webb. Rich admitted he was stunned, both by the decision and by the execution of it, and said he genuinely does not know how it will work this fall.

Wickersham's explanation is that play calling is central to Payton's identity. He refers to himself as a play caller as much as he does a head coach. But over the course of last season, Wickersham saw something creep in.

"The insecurity of calling plays was starting to creep in a little bit," he said.

Payton put a number on it himself. It is a lot harder to call plays at 62 than at 42. Wickersham said he was stunned to hear it, because his assumption was that a coach only accumulates experience and knowledge. Payton's own analogy was gentler and more human than that. When you get a little older, maybe you do not like to drive at night in the rain.

Rich pushed back on the premise, and reasonably so. This is the man who called an onside kick to start the second half of a Super Bowl and a fake punt on fourth and 11 deep into a playoff game. Insecure has never been a word attached to Sean Payton.

"Well, he's human," Wickersham said.

He is not predicting a clean handoff. He expects moments where Payton overrules Webb, moments where he wants to and does not, and moments where Webb calls a bad play and Payton takes the blame. He also floated that the fourth and one against New England might have gone differently under a simpler chain of command, since Payton was cycling through drawing them offsides, then a run, then a timeout, then a pass.

Wickersham was careful to call that second-guessing rather than reporting. What he does believe is that Payton decided this is Webb's turn, the same authority Payton himself enjoyed under Bill Parcells, who used to look at his call sheet the day before games and ask whether he was trying to make a name for himself.

The last question is logistical and possibly the most telling. Webb runs those meetings now. Nobody knows yet whether the Broncos still work until 2:00 a.m.