Billboard Slogan of the Week, Game Seven: "Do Your Job"

BY TIM SCANDURRO

Several years ago a giant banner hung at the Saints indoor practice facility featuring a picture of head coach Sean Payton on a game day sideline, wearing a headset and his trademark game face scowl.  Emblazoned on the banner were the words “Do Your Job.”

The phrase wasn’t original to Payton; it was borrowed, like so much of his coaching philosophy, from his mentor Bill Parcells.  Parcells’ first Giants team had a rough year, winning only three games, and he was complaining to Raiders and NFL legend Al Davis about the Giants’ personnel and how he didn’t have enough to work with.   Davis explained the different roles of the head coach and general manager to Parcells thusly: “Shut the (expletive) up and just do your job.”

The phrase became ingrained on the Parcells coaching tree. Bill Belichick wrote a book with that title.  Payton often told the story about going for two unsuccessfully in a brutal loss to the 49ers and getting second-guessed by the Whole Foods guy behind the meat counter the following week.  “Look, just worry about your frickin’ meat,” Payton told him.  Different context, same philosophy.  Do your job.  Do YOUR job.

This game we have coming up Saturday perfectly embodies the wisdom of those three words. Army’s system will test your discipline, constantly probing and poking, willing to continue running the ball until someone on defense doesn’t play their assignment and a big play happens.  There are football cliche’s about stopping the triple option:  You have to stop the fullback dive.  If you have the A gap, be in the A gap. If you have the pitch man, stay with the pitch man even if the quarterback is a yard away from you. 

It all sounds simple until you see all the variants Army runs.  Sure, there’s the traditional triple option.  But then you have to deal with the midline option, the speed option, the counter option, the pistol formation option, that rocket toss play they run to get the ball on the perimeter fast, all the while with their linemen pulling or blocking down or cutting you at the knees.  Then when you’re a safety and you’ve been running the alley all day in run support, they call that nasty play that starts off looking like an option and ends up with a receiver twenty yards behind you.

On top of all that you have to deal with Army’s legendary white-hatted 12th man and his friends.  They are top five in the country in fewest penalties.

So Coach Gasparato’s defense has its hands full.  Discipline, one of the team’s four core values, is at a premium this week.  Not just eye discipline but consistency discipline; I’ve heard our coaches say “don’t get bored doing your job.”  The one time you abandon your assignment to make someone else’s play, boom.

Indiana coach Bobby Knight said that discipline means recognizing what you’re supposed to do, doing it to the best of your ability, and doing it that way all the time.  Discipline has been a constant talking point from the staff all year because it’s been too often absent during some of our games.  Add to that the leakiness we’ve shown against the interior run game at times, and you have some inconsistencies that we really need to see get ironed out come Saturday.  Army went into Manhattan, Kansas and controlled the ball for 27 minutes in the second half of their win over K-State earlier this year. We simply cannot allow these eight or nine minute drives and have this game come down to the last series again.

Army week is always unique.  Our entire defensive philosophy and alignment and even personnel will be different Saturday.  It’s a lot to put on young men, but you have to just grind.  As much as all of us want revenge for last year, we don’t need heroism or unbridled emotion.  What we need, play after play after play, is to be physical, sound, consistent and relentless.

So that’s the billboard slogan of the week: just do your job. Do that, and the revenge we all want for what happened on that cold night last December will take care of itself.