UNEXPECTED ANNOUNCEMENT: Orleans saints head coach under fire because of…

NEW ORLEANS — Before Sean Payton took his first head coaching job in New Orleans in 2006, the Saints had a grand total of one playoff victory since their founding in 1967.

The standard will be considerably higher for the next head coach in the Big Easy.

Payton, whose 16-year tenure with the club included its only Super Bowl championship and also a one-season suspension stemming from the NFL’s bounty investigation, is leaving coaching — for now.

Payton informed the team on Tuesday that he is leaving his first and only NFL head coaching job with a 152-89 regular-season record — and nine playoff appearances — in 15 seasons. The 2009 Saints won the NFL title.

“I don’t like the word retirement,” Payton said Tuesday afternoon at an announcement attended by owner Gayle Benson, top management and assistant coaches. “I still have a vision for doing things in football. And I’ll be honest with you, that might be coaching again at some point. I don’t think it’s this year, I think maybe in the future. That’s not where my heart is right now.”

Payton is under contract with the Saints for three more seasons, and if he’s hired by another NFL team before then, his new team would have to provide compensation to New Orleans.

The Saints made the relatively risky decision to hire Payton as a rookie head coach in their first season back in New Orleans after being displaced from the city by Hurricane Katrina for the entire 2005 season, when they went 3-13 under Jim Haslett.

Payton oversaw an immediate storybook turnaround. The Saints won the NFC South, captured the NFC’s second playoff seed, and advanced to the franchise’s first NFC title game by beating Philadelphia in a divisional-round playoff in a rebuilt Superdome — the site of widespread damage and suffering of stranded evacuees right after Katrina had flooded 80 percent of New Orleans.

Since then, Payton coached the Saints to the playoffs in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.

New Orleans narrowly missed the playoffs this past season, going 9-8 in its first campaign since the retirement of Drew Brees. Payton had lured the quarterback to New Orleans as a free agent in 2006.

Payton said he urged the Saints to take a risk on Brees, who was coming off throwing-shoulder surgery, because “we weren’t winning any jump balls” for talent — given the challenges the Saints faced rebuilding the franchise in a community simultaneously rebuilding from one of the worst disasters in American history.

Brees went on to set every significant franchise passing record in a high-flying offense designed and called by Payton, who’d been a quarterback in high school in Naperville, Illinois, and in college at Eastern Illinois.

Under Payton, the Saints became a perennial contender, and they beat Peyton Manning and Indianapolis 31-17 to win their lone Super Bowl. They also lost the 2018 conference title game to the Rams after a blown officiating call that led to a temporary NFL rules change.

Payton was a member of the league’s powerful competition committee from 2017 until leaving that position last November.

“I don’t know what’s next and it kind of feels good,” he said.

“Look, I read the reports and I understand — I’ve not spoken to anyone from a media outlet relative to doing television, or radio. Maybe that opportunity arises,” Payton said. “But every time I read something that says he’s in line for this job, I’ll call my agent Don (Yee) and I’ll say ‘Don, did you hear something because I’ve not heard anything?’ That’s OK. I think I’d like to do that. I think I’d be pretty good at it.”

Payton said he wasn’t burnt out on coaching and in fact enjoyed the challenges of the 2021 season, which not only was the second straight to occur with pandemic-related restrictions and the unpredictable roster instability that came with it, but also began with the club’s displacement to the Dallas area for a month because of Hurricane Ida.