Gruden has faith in Saints

They were 10 miles apart last week, Jon Gruden in a Culver City studio shooting his “Monday Night Football” intros, and Sean Payton staying in a Hollywood hotel, in Los Angeles for both the ESPYs and to promote his new book.

In many ways, though, Gruden and Payton are even closer than that.

They’re good friends and the only coaches ever to lead NFC South teams to Super Bowl victories. They’re also separated in age by just four months, both were small-college quarterbacks (Gruden at Dayton; Payton at Eastern Illinois), and both amassed 38-26 records through their first four regular seasons.

“When you talk to them, you feel like you’re talking to the same person,” said Ron Jaworski, who shares the broadcast booth with Gruden. “We had the Saints a couple times last year, and I loved that [production] meeting because Jon and Sean are like clones. They speak the same language.”

So it’s only natural that Gruden might have some helpful tips for his old pal Payton, the guy he hired as Philadelphia’s quarterbacks coach in 1997, back when Gruden was Eagles offensive coordinator. After all, Gruden is intimately familiar with the perks and pitfalls of winning a Super Bowl. His Tampa Bay teams struggled mightily after winning it all in early 2003, finishing with losing records in three of the next four seasons.

But Gruden thinks there’s one four-letter word that gives the Saints a better chance of avoiding similar turbulence: D-R-E-W.

“I’ve never met a guy like Drew Brees,” Gruden said of the Saints quarterback. “The guy is so focused. He’s just different. He’s unflappable.”

As long as Brees stays healthy, Gruden said, the Saints will be playoff contenders and maybe more. He emphasized that it’s not that the quarterback is the whole team, but someone that talented is the linchpin.

“Think of the Patriots and Colts when they won it; it really had a lot to do with the trigger,” Gruden said. “Peyton [Manning] is coming back, Tom [Brady] is coming back, and Brees is going to be one of those top three guys.... The Saints are going to make a strong case to be there again because of that guy if he stays healthy.”

Payton conceded it’s hard to understate what Brees in particular means to the Saints’ offense.

“The position touches the ball 65 to 70 times a game,” he said. “Somebody said it best: Everybody gets on the plane, and the quarterback gets on last. He gets up in the cockpit, and everyone else waits for him to land it safely or fly the whole thing into a mountain.”

That said, Payton said his coaching focus from the start has been built around what Bill Belichick has done with New England, put the spotlight on the team as much as possible and not any individual player. That helped the Patriots go 11-5 with Matt Cassel at quarterback after Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury in Week 1 of 2008.

“When we first got here in 2006, we looked at the Patriots and said it’s good business to study who is successful in your industry,” Payton said. “They had won three championships and had done it with great quarterback play, good sound coaching philosophy, a team that was unselfish for the most part with a great makeup of veteran and young players.”

In his just-released book, “Home Team, Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life,” Payton writes about going to extreme -- and humorous -- lengths to prepare his team to play the Patriots last season. During the week leading up to the game, he called a meeting and dissected the team as if he were actually Belichick.

“I made a careful note of how he scrunched up his face and how he tilted his head,” Payton writes of Belichick. “I became Bill Belichick. The hair greased over to the side and darkened. The blue hoodie with the New England Patriots logo. The khakis and the tennis shoes.

“To get the voice right, I went on NFL.com Tuesday night and listened to Mike Lombardi interviewing Bill. Listened three or four times until I had that flat, tightly wound, slightly psycho-sounding monotone exactly right. And we made a little film. It was me as Bill Belichick, speaking to the Patriots about all the things that sucked about the New Orleans Saints, cutting away to video of every imaginable Saints screw-up.”

Payton said that he hasn’t heard from Belichick since the book was released but that the impersonation story “is out of great respect for what they do there.” The Saints are scheduled to conduct three days of joint practices with the Patriots in New England in mid-August.

Payton, who has his own Brady-caliber quarterback in Brees, also thinks Belichick will take the impersonation the tongue-in-cheek way it was intended.

“Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” Payton said, “and we think they’ve done it better than anyone.”

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sam.farmer@latimes.com