New Orleans Saints Head Coach Sean Payton
Postgame Press Conference
Monday, September 9, 2019

Opening comments:
"Obviously, an exciting game. One of the challenges early for us after this first game is just a short week, and yet there's so much we need to clean up on from that tape. Being able to get our players in and clean some of those mistakes up before we go on and try to do that in a quick period of time is something that we'll have to do. They fought. They hung in there. We ended up, obviously, with a huge kick at the end by Will (Lutz). It was a good win."

(On his level of confidence in the winning field goal)
"I think he had one earlier in the game where he had enough leg, so I think that it's more about how does he strike it. Is it between the uprights? I felt like he had enough leg for it, but anytime that you are attempting a longer field goal, the trajectory begins to drop. The snap, the hold, all of that was smooth. It was a big play….We are running him out for a 58 yarder with two seconds, so, yeah (I was confident) with the way that he is kicking. Part of it is just trying to manage the clock with the last timeout and then how to give yourself the best chance to win."

(On flipping the field in the fourth quarter)
"There were a ton of plays, I felt, in that game (that) were swing plays. We didn't play really smart when we got the lead. We gave up a big play to their top receiver (Deandre Hopkins). That is bad football. We cannot allow that to happen. He made too many plays tonight, for one of our goals to be to eliminate him or do not let him beat you. We tried to. That kind of thing, we need to clean up as players and as coaches."

(On what did he see on the Houston defense on the final play before the winning kick)
"If you get man or zone, it's going to affect the type of route that we want to run. We know that we are in a down- down situation, so we are not looking for any yards after the catch. We are looking to catch (the ball), get down, and call timeout. Versus zone, there are certain looks. Versus man, there are certain looks. Drew (Brees) was doing a good job of trying to assess what the coverage was."

(On the matchup between Ryan Ramczyk against J.J. Watt)
"I thought that he (Ramczyk) played pretty well. I didn't hear a lot of Watt's name."

(On how often the team works on the last minute game scenarios)
"A lot. The unique thing is there are 85 to 185 different scenarios. Is it 28 seconds with two timeouts? Just the multitude of scenarios (are plenty). Drew has got a real good clock in his head. He understands where we are at time-wise. We really value the timeout. You can tell the one play where we took a few ticks off the clock maybe too many and grounded it, but we wanted to keep that timeout. The minute you use the timeout, then what you do defensively changes, they (Houston) protect the sidelines and you get really handcuffed (on offense). We have to work getting the ball back to the official cleanly, (and) quickly getting set. There are so many things that go into it. (We practice it) quite a bit."

(On DeShaun Watson)
"He is a good player. He made some really big plays tonight. I thought he played exceptionally well. We knew that going in, that he was someone who could beat you. Obviously, down the field, he has a really good arm and a tremendous amount of confidence from his own teammates. It was a good win against a good player…We tried to keep him in the pocket as best that we could. He made some big plays from the pocket and beat us in some of the pressure looks. The touchdown pass at the end of the game was against a pressure look."