Kevin James and professional sports might not have much in common. However, according to NBC Sports’ Peter King, the Hollywood star is the chosen candidate to portray New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton.
Sean Payton was serving a one-year suspension from the NFL in 2012 and decided to use the time away from top-tier football to coach his son’s sixth-grade football team.
Ideal for the Role
As you can imagine, there is a lot of potential for slapstick humor in a situation in which a decorated coach used to working with professional athletes starts coaching sixth graders.
And who better to star in a movie about an adult trying to deal with sixth graders than Kevin James. The King of Queens and Grown Ups star excels in physical comedy and is not ashamed to fall down or run into objects in his movies. That is probably one of the reasons why he was cast as the former Dallas Cowboys assistant head coach.
Another reason why Kevin James got the role is the company that produces the movie. Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions is the production company behind the movie and Kevin James and Adam Sandler go back a long way.
In fact, some of James’ biggest hits have been produced by Adam Sandler’s company and he has appeared in eight movies that Happy Madison Productions has been involved with.
Payton Read and Corrected the Script
All of this means that the Sean Payton Netflix picture won’t receive an Oscar nomination or be a slow-burning biopic. What it will likely be, however, is a movie that is loosely based on a year in which a top-tier NFL coach decided to make the most of a bad situation and use his one-year ban to coach his son’s football team.
Payton doesn’t seem to mind that, though, and has instead decided to be involved in the movie as much as he can and give his valuable input. According to Peter King, he has already read the script and made corrections to it where he felt they were needed before sending it back.
For those of you wanting to see the movie and then compare it with the real story, Payton was the offensive coachof the sixth-graders football team at Liberty Christian in Argyle, Texas.
Incidentally, Jason Witten, the former Dallas Cowboys tight end, was recently announced as the head coach at Liberty Christian, and football fans in Argyle are obviously seeing their fair share of NFL heavyweights down there.
According to a 2019 Sports Illustrated interview, Payton took the Liberty Christian job seriously. He created original plays for his sixth graders and even used his NFL playbook when he needed to up the ante.
