Do Sean Payton's DC candidates indicate a blind spot for defense?

BOSTON -- Last offseason, the Denver Broncos invested a lot of resources and money into Russell Wilson, in hopes of restoring the franchise to Super Bowl contention. It didn't work out too well.

In the months after that trade had been completed, the Walton family completed their purchase of the team. Now with control of the franchise, the new ownership group fired head coach Nathaniel Hackett before hiring Sean Payton.

The goal was simple: Bring in the highest-profile coach to provide some stability and respectability back to the Denver Broncos.

Perhaps the 59-year-old Payton will do exactly that. But ... his early decisions in seeking a defensive coordinator have to be setting off some alarms in Colorado.

Payton settled on Vance Joseph as his pick to be DC in Denver, after an interview process that could politely be described as peculiar. To say the least.

Despite leading the 31st-ranked scoring defense last year, Joseph was the most qualified and competent coach involved in the round of interviews for the position. But that's only because the other candidates were Rex Ryan and Matt Patricia.

Ryan was a great defensive coach from 2005 to, say, 2012. His final two years with the Jets weren't great, and his two years in Buffalo were bad. The last one was also seven years ago. He hasn't worked in an NFL facility since then. After leaving coaching, he settled into his natural role of spouting opinions on TV. It's working out quite well for him, and NFL teams had largely moved on from considering him for jobs ... until Payton came along.

Having him in the building for an interview was a bit bizarre. Yet arguably just as bizarre was Payton's interview with Matt Patricia.

As the world knows well, Patricia was tabbed as Bill Belichick's offensive play-caller last year in an experiment that went as poorly -- if not worse -- as everybody not named Belichick imagined it would.

Patricia had worked just two seasons in the NFL as an offensive coach, and that was in an assistant's capacity all the way back in 2004 and 2005. After that, he worked 12 seasons on defense before spending three tumultuous seasons as Detroit's head coach. In 2020, when Patricia was fired, the Lions had the very worst defense in the NFL in terms of both points and yards allowed. In his last season running New England's defense, the Patriots ranked 29th in yards allowed (but fifth in points allowed) before giving up 666 combined passing yards from Blake Bortles and Nick Foles in the AFC championship and Super Bowl.

The track record on Patricia on both sides of the ball was spotty, and he hadn't coached a really good defense in six years. For Payton to bring him in as one of just three known candidates for the defensive coordinator job was odd. Very odd. 

So, Joseph got the job. Given the field of candidates, he was the best choice.

But the whole process has to make one wonder if Sean Payton still has a blind spot for defense.

"Still" is the operative word there, because there's little to no doubt that the defensive side of the ball was a liability for the Saints for much of Payton's 15 seasons in New Orleans. The Saints ranked in the bottom third of the NFL in yards allowed in seven of his 15 seasons, while ranking in the bottom third of the league in points allowed five times. Only in five seasons -- or a third of his tenure -- did the Saints rank in the top third of the league in defense. The worst of those years came when Rob Ryan -- Rex's twin brother -- was Payton's defensive coordinator.

It got so bad in New Orleans that despite Drew Brees leading the league in passing yards for three straight years from 2014-16, the Saints went just 21-28.

Dennis Allen, who replaced Rob Ryan, eventually got the defense to a solid place. But a whole lot of years seem to have been wasted down in New Orleans thanks to a substandard defense in New Orleans.

Theoretically, that should not be an issue in Denver, as the Broncos' calling card has been defense for the better part of the last decade. If things go sour though, it will be easy to look back to this interview process to pinpoint where it started to go wrong.