SaintsBro

Great thread, ScottyRo, great post.

I have thought a great deal about the Payton thing.

One thing to me about this whole situation that is really weird, that nobody has really talked about much, for him personally, is that Payton basically gets to "die" for a year, and then see what happens -- see what people think about him, what they do and what they say about him when he's not around, and what happens to the team and to his friends and everything else. And then he gets to come back! It's like a Charles Dickens moment, which almost never happens to anybody in real life.

Because while he's inside this weird black hole of semi-non-existence that Goodell has put him in, Payton still gets to see the response from the fans -- which was pretty amazing -- and from the team, which has been nothing but expressions of love and admiration for him. He gets to see exactly which writers trash him and which people stick up for him. He gets to see what Carmichael calls on 3rd and goal from the 1, or if his longtime friend Joe Vitt can maybe win a ring as a head coach... And he gets to realize that yeah, there are probably some things in his personal life that need to be taken care of, cleaned up. Him going to the Hall Of Fame ceremony with his son, to see Cortez Kennedy inducted, that's no accident. That was real.

The Freeh report is going to be important, too. It will probably be a boring read. I think Benson is realizing that there are things within the corporate culture of the Saints organization that need to be changed and done better. The organization itself will be stronger. Maybe they figure out what to do with Rita until she gets her crazy **** together, chain of command, decision making, problem resolution, boring internal stuff like that.

And lastly, I look at stuff like, not the wiretapping allegations themselves but the question of HOW the allegations happened. HOW does one get these crazy unprovable anonymous wiretapping allegations made against your GM, blindsiding you at the worst possible time -- what leads up to that, what are the reasons for it? How does something that effed up and impossible happen, to a gazillion dollar corporation? And in all of these incidents, Bountygate, wiretapping, Geoff Santini, in all of these you had a situation where you had out-of-control disguntled ex-employees who were let go and yet could run around outside the organization and extract anonymous revenge. So I think there is some corporate lesson to be learned there, although we don't really know what it is yet.