FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — While the bulk of attention after the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts focused on quarterback Drew Brees and cornerback Tracy Porter — two Saints with improbable journeys whose career performances came in the most important game either had ever played — the path of Sean Payton was just as, if not more, unlikely.

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Living Story

Super Bowl XLIV

The Times's N.F.L. coverage of Super Bowl XLIV and the 2010 playoffs with background, analysis, timelines and past articles from NYTimes.com and Google.

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On Sunday, it was Payton, the coach once stripped of his play-calling duties while he was the Giants’ offensive coordinator, whose game plan kept the ball away from quarterback Peyton Manning and the Colts’ productive offense. On Sunday, it was Payton, not Peyton, whose team produced 31 of the final 38 points, matching the biggest deficit overcome in Super Bowl history.

For this, Payton joined one of the most exclusive clubs in sports. Only 28 men belong. Each coached a team to a Super Bowl championship. Payton became the latest to grab hold of the Lombardi Trophy — he said he slept with it — and he may have been the first to drool on it.

Stranger still is one subset of that list that Payton also joined, members of the same fraternity who once served as Giants’ coordinators: Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, a Mount Rushmore of N.F.L. coaches.

It was with the Giants in 2002 that Payton failed, when differences in philosophy led Coach Jim Fassel to remove Payton’s play-calling responsibilities. This did little to dent the confidence of Payton.

After Payton was hired by the Saints in 2006, he stood in front of his team before the season. He said many of their stories mirrored his, that their locker room was full of the unwanted and underrated, the unlikely and unloved. He told the Saints they would contend for a championship and they insisted that they believed him.

“He doesn’t care what anybody thinks,” running back Mike Bell said. “He’s all man.”

Payton is a coach cut from the Parcells cloth, and in the coach called Big Tuna, he found a mentor, an ally and a confidant. After Payton left the Giants after the 2002 season, he and Parcells met on the private plane of Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ owner. For two and a half hours, they talked about football and passion and drew plays on napkins until their supply ran out.

For three years, from 2003 and to 2005, Payton was Parcells’s quarterbacks coach and then assistant head coach and said each day, he took something from Parcells. When Mickey Loomis, the Saints’ general manager, was searching for a coach in 2006 “with a pedigree from a really disciplined, tough-minded mentor,” he found Payton, an unlikely choice but one who fit the bill.

Thus Payton’s itinerant path continued. He had played quarterback at Naperville Central High School near Chicago. He played in college at Eastern Illinois.

In one season, 1987, he played in the Arena Football League, the Canadian Football League and the N.F.L. That was as a replacement player, for three games with the Chicago Bears, in which Payton produced these numbers: 8 of 23, 79 yards, 1 interception.

Payton even played for the Leicester Panthers in the British League, an experience he compared to the novel, “Playing for Pizza,” written by John Grisham. It was there, Payton said, where he began contemplating becoming a coach.

So Payton crisscrossed the country, working at San Diego State and Indiana State and Miami of Ohio and Illinois. His first N.F.L. coaching job came with Philadelphia, 10 seasons after he started. Eventually, Payton helped find Tony Romo, now the Cowboys’ Pro Bowl quarterback. Eventually, he developed a reputation as an offensive guru, a master of the mismatch.

Payton arrived in New Orleans the same season as Brees, and in the past four years, they have produced the N.F.L.’s top-ranked offense three times. This season, Brees set a league completion record, and together they delivered the first Super Bowl in franchise history.

“Sean believed in me when nobody else did,” Brees said. “My first year here was his first year. It was like a new chapter in both our lives. I wouldn’t want to play for anyone else. I get a proud feeling when I think of the road he has traveled.”

Payton saved some of his best work for halftime of the Super Bowl, when he declared the Saints would run a play called Ambush to start the second half. This was classic Payton, confidence unwavering, gambling once again.

All of his experiences — the travel and the failure and apprenticeships — went into that decision. Payton told his players he planned to win, and by calling Ambush, an onside kick, to begin the third quarter, he demonstrated what he meant. The Saints recovered the kick, after a series of odd bounces, and another Payton gamble had succeeded.

It changed the game. The Saints drew from their coach’s swagger. The Colts never recovered. “Gutsy” is how the Saints described their coach.

They pointed to last off-season, when Payton offered to personally pay $250,000 to land the defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, the man who changed his defense into a swarming, turnover-producing machine. They noted Payton’s play-calling, the way perception had now shifted.

Payton climbed atop the podium with his prized possession already in his arms. He held that Lombardi Trophy tightly and kept holding it through the night.