Loomis large part of Saints' dream season.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

By consensus, if not officially yet, the executive of the year in the NFL is Mickey Loomis, the graduate of Willamette High School and the University of Oregon.

It's not simply because Loomis, as executive vice president and general manager of the New Orleans Saints, presides over one of the league's best teams, the Saints visiting the Chicago Bears on Sunday in the NFC Championship game, playing for a berth in their first Super Bowl.

It's because Loomis guided the Saints through a 2005 season torn asunder in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the franchise forced to relocate to San Antonio, enduring a 3-13 disaster - except, in flood-ravaged New Orleans, no one uses that word for something as mundane as football - and then provided the leadership in a series of major decisions that set the stage for the Saints' tremendous season in their return to the Superdome.

It was Loomis who hired Dallas Cowboys assistant Sean Payton as the team's new head coach for this season. And Loomis who signed free-agent quarterback Drew Brees when other teams were wary because he'd undergone surgery to repair a torn labrum.

That transaction showed other free-agents that the Saints were back in business, and it enabled New Orleans to select Reggie Bush when the USC running back fell to the No. 2 pick, instead of forcing them to consider a quarterback such as Vince Young or Matt Leinart.

Brees has been all that New Orleans wanted; Bush was the first pick in what turned out to be a great draft by the Saints, as they got safety Roman Harper in the second round, starting guard Jahri Evans in the fourth, and 1,000-yard receiver Marques Colston in the seventh.

"I've been in all the meetings, and without Mickey's leadership in the last 12 months, there's no way we'd be where we are right now," owner Tom Benson told Peter King of Sports Illustrated. "We needed a new coach, a new quarterback and some pretty significant overhauling - on top of all the organizational things we had to go through with Katrina.

"He was making decisions that had never been considered by other pro sports franchises, and I think where he's taken us is nothing short of amazing."

The decision to hire Payton set everything else in motion, yet Benson admitted being skeptical. "Mickey did that solely on his own," Benson said. "It's proven to be the right choice."

Indeed, Loomis trusted his research, and his instinct, and the rest has been a historic season, in a community that still faces major problems after Katrina.

In the NFL since 1983, when he was hired as business manager by the Seattle Seahawks - he'd been passed over for a job as ticket manager at Oregon, and was teaching in Elmira and coaching JV basketball at Willamette - Loomis has never experienced a season as uniquely "electric" as this one.

"It's just hard to describe, how excited our fans and our region are about the team," he said this week.

"And they would be excited if nothing had happened last year. But because of what happened a year ago, with the storm and the way people's personal lives are in disarray, the emotion is double or triple what it would be ordinarily.

"I think our team feels that. I know that for the guys who were here a year ago, there's an emotional level, and the guys we've added have developed an understanding of what the team means to our region and have embraced that."

As Loomis has always embraced his Bethel roots - Malabon Elementary School, Cascade Junior High, Willamette High (class of '74) and Northwest Christian College, where he played basketball before attending Oregon. His parents, Jerry and Viola, still live here, and his mother was in New Orleans for a couple of games this season, though Loomis figures the bigger thrill for her was meeting famed chef Emeril Lagasse, an ardent Saints fan.

In New Orleans, however, the best recipe for success this football season has been cooked up by Mickey Loomis, and the Saints have kicked it up to within a notch of the Super Bowl.