Former special teams coach Mike Westhoff will receive an Award of Excellence from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
An influential special teams coach, Westhoff spent 33 seasons in the NFL. In 2017, Westhoff joined Sean Payton's staff in New Orleans as his special teams coach midseason and remained in the position until the end of the 2018 season.
Westhoff had extended tenures with the Miami Dolphins (1986-2000) and New York Jets (2001-2012). He also worked for the Colts and Broncos at the NFL level as well as Indiana, Dayton, Northwestern and Texas Christian at the collegiate level and the Arizona Outlaws of the USFL.
Among his many successes with the Saints' special teams units, Westhoff also played a key role in quarterback Taysom Hill first seeing the field for the Black and Gold.
"I'm walking through the locker room and here this guy's coming out of a shower with a towel wrap around him and he looks like Hercules and it's Taysom Hill," Westhoff said on the New Orleans Saints Podcast. "I went, 'Who's this guy?' So he's a quarterback. He never dresses. I said, 'Well, not so fast.' Next thing you know, I grabbed a hold of him. I went up to see Sean (Payton). He told me all about Taysom and I said, look, I've had a lot of luck with quarterbacks. He said, give him a try, go ahead."
In Westhoff's two seasons in New Orleans, the Saints' special teams ranked fourth in the NFL in fewest punt return yards allowed (309) while posting the seventh-highest kickoff return average (23.5) and field goal percentage (89.4). New Orleans was also one of 11 teams in the two-year span to record a kickoff return for touchdown.
"We went from a team that was pretty much non-plausible to one that the rest of the year only had one negative play, and that's because I made a stupid call the entire year and we turned it all," Westhoff said. "We went from ranked 31st to rank first, and I'm very proud of that."
A cocktail dinner and awards luncheon to celebrate this year's honorees will take place June 24-25 in Canton. Selected alongside Westhoff in the assistant coaches category were Ted Cottrell and Bobb McKittrick.
Westhoff is not the first former Saints staffer to receive this award. Longtime trainer Dean Kleinschmidt and former defensive coordinator Monty Kiffin were both honored in 2024.
