Saints running back Mark Ingram has been ruled out of Sunday’s game against the St. Louis Rams, coach Sean Payton said Friday.

Ingram suffered a bruised heel in the Saints’ 62-7 win against Indianapolis on Sunday night and missed practice for the third consecutive day on Friday.

To compensate for Ingram’s absence, Payton said the club would activate Chris Ivory from the active/physically unable to perform list to the 53-man active roster. Ivory, the club’s leading rusher last season, practiced throughout the week and has fully recovered from offseason surgery to repair a broken bone in his foot, Payton said.

The New Orleans Saints seemingly received all of the breaks in 2009. Last season, they seemingly got none.

So far, 2011 has been breaking just as bad. They had to open the season on the road against arguably the league’s best team. And they did so without their kicker and best pass rusher, who’s serving a 3-year-old suspension.

Two weeks into this young season the club already has eight players on injured lists and five players on the weekly injury report.

One name among the infirmed sticks out: Marques Colston. Easily the worst break of the season was the one to the right side of the star receiver’s collarbone. Colston is expected to miss four weeks while his surgically repaired clavicle mends.

The Saints have weathered injuries. They’ve lost nearly every skill-position player on the roster during the past five years and still managed to ring up yards and points like a pinball machine.

Colston, though, is different. He’s an outlier in the Saints’ high-powered offense. He’s the No. 1 receiver, the “X” in football lingo, the primary receiver in most NFL offenses. Next to Drew Brees, he’s the one cog in the machine that might be indispensable.

Robert Meachem, Lance Moore, Devery Henderson and Adrian Arrington all have the ability, know-how and experience to play the X. Collectively, they might be able to replace him. But none of them is Colston, a rare package of size, speed and agility, with grip-lock hands.

The Saints will move the ball without Colston. They still have more weapons than 80 percent of the teams in the NFL. Scoring, though, could be an issue. The Saints ranked 20th in the NFL in red-zone offense last season and scored only one touchdown in five red-zone trips last week.

Colston is Brees’ go-to guy in the red zone. He has made a living working the middle on red-zone mismatches in the slot. Only five NFL receivers have scored more touchdowns than Colston’s 40 since 2006. He’s Brees’ security blanket in clutch situations, not only in the red zone but on third down.

This is where his loss will be felt most. Defenses now can concentrate their efforts even more on Moore on third down and tight end Jimmy Graham in the red zone.

The Saints are 4-4 in games played without Colston. In the lone game he missed last season, the Saints passed for 199 yards. It was the only time last season they failed to gain 200 yards through the air. Coincidence?

Colston has never been fully appreciated, by fans or the national media, in part because he refuses to draw attention to himself. He might be the only receiver in the NFL without a Twitter account. But his coaches and teammates know how important he is to their success.

“He’s a 6-foot-5 slot receiver. There are not too many of those in the NFL,” Moore said.

“He’s a quiet guy, but when he talks to you, he’s a guy that you do listen to, because of who he is and the numbers he has put up,” Meachem said.

Colston’s quiet demeanor belies an inner toughness, which was on full display in the final seconds of the Packers’ loss. He suffered his injury while making a spectacular diving 23-yard catch with 31 seconds left. Colston said he felt the pop and the pain and knew immediately he’d broken his clavicle.

Normally, he’d have subbed out of the game, but the Saints were in hurry-up mode and out of timeouts. Rules dictate a 10-second run-off of the play clock in such situations.

Colston said he wasn’t aware of the run-off rule. But he knew time was of the essence. Every second counted, and he wasn’t about to waste one, even with his shoulder throbbing in pain.

So Colston did what he’d been coached to do. He ran to his position, lined up and ran the next play. Replay images show Colston doubled-over in pain while positioning himself for the next snap.

And then he did it again when Brees finally stopped the clock with a spike.

Yet, even then, with the clock stopped and time available to substitute a teammate, Colston stayed in the game for the final play.

“Nobody wants to volunteer to come out of the game,” Colston said this week. “I knew I was hurt, but … I take pride in being a tough player.”

It’s debatable whether Colston was helping or hurting the team in that instance. After all, he was essentially a one-armed target. Maybe he didn’t want to let down his teammates. Maybe he thought he could serve as a decoy, and indeed, Packers safeties Morgan Burnett and Nick Collins were trailing him on A.J. Hawk’s fateful interference on Darren Sproles.

Regardless, his effort epitomized the traits team officials preach about daily: character; selflessness; mental and physical toughness.

Hopefully the club will consider his courage along with his catches when contract talks begin with him on a new deal.

“I figured something was wrong obviously when he’s holding his shoulder and hanging it in a weird position,” Brees said Wednesday. “We just felt like if he was doing that, something was probably wrong and for him to stay in when his team needed him for those last two plays, obviously, it says a lot about him as a player and his toughness.”

Plain and simple, Colston is a winner. And now the Saints must try to win without him.

Starting today against the Chicago Bears, everyone is going to discover how difficult that can be.

The New Orleans Saints signed Coach Sean Payton to a multiyear extension Monday, another step in an evolving policy of ensuring the organization locks up talented people in its top rungs for the foreseeable future.

Quarterback Drew Brees represents the last and perhaps most important cog in that machine, but with Payton and General Manager Mickey Loomis on board long term the club is widely expected to ink a blockbuster deal with Brees in the near future.

Those three are generally recognized as the trio that turned the Saints around, transforming one of the worst outfits in professional sports into a perennial playoff factor and Super Bowl champion.

The terms of Payton’s deal, which will run through the 2015 season, were not disclosed. However, it is believed to have propelled him into the top salary ranks of the NFL coaching fraternity and, if true, his annual pay would jump from somewhere north of $4 million to the neighborhood of $6 million or beyond.

Payton said he was grateful for the stamp of approval the deal represented.

“It is good news and I would start by recognizing the significant role that Mickey Loomis and (owner) Tom Benson have had not just in this contract for me but the stability and the success we’ve had as an organization,” Payton said. “I’m very thankful to have that opportunity here for another five years.”

When asked if his new pay scale represented a thank you for past accomplishments or a demand for new ones, Payton chuckled.

“It’s a performance-based business,” he said. “And our jobs as coaches, our jobs as front office people, our jobs as players are to be competitive and win. And I think when you have that success then these type of things happen.”

The success thus far has been unprecedented for the Saints. Payton, 47, took over as coach in 2006 and since then has taken a team with one playoff victory in its previous 39 years into the postseason three times. Twice those trips went to the NFC championship game and, in 2009, beyond as the Saints won Super Bowl XLIV.

Overall, Payton has amassed a 53-33 record with New Orleans.

“I also recognize the fluidness, if you will, of the profession in regards to each year you see six or seven head coaches that are out of jobs,” he said. “And so we’ve started, awhile back, in 2006 in trying to build something that is consistent, trying to build a program and that’s something that really never stops. You don’t ever really arrive, you’re just constantly ongoing.”

Benson echoed that point in a statement issued by the team.

“Our goal is to continue to build a TRADITION of winning here in New Orleans and Sean represents that tradition,” the statement read with the emphasis in the original.

The deal is presumed to make Payton among the league’s most handsomely compensated coaches. Salary information on NFL coaches is notoriously thin, but Patriots Coach Bill Belichick and Washington’s Mike Shanahan are multiple Super Bowl winners who, at roughly $7 million per year, are reputedly the top paid coaches in professional football, according to an analysis performed by Forbes magazine earlier this year.

Behind them were a cluster of coaches in the $5 million to $6 million range. They include Chicago’s Lovie Smith, the Giants’ Tom Coughlin, Philadelphia’s Andy Reid and Arizona’s Ken Whisenhunt. All of them have gotten a team to a Super Bowl and, in Coughlin’s case, won one.

Packers Coach Mike McCarthy, who was hired the same year New Orleans engaged Payton and is his opponent in the upcoming NFL season opener Thursday night, is also reportedly a member of the plus-$5 million club. McCarthy joined with a contract extension he signed within a month of Green Bay’s victory last February in Super Bowl XLV.

With only two exceptions — Seattle’s Pete Carroll and San Francisco’s Jim Harbaugh — all of the highest paid coaches are proven winners in the NFL. The league’s 10 top-paid coaches have a winning percentage of .591, Forbes reported, and have combined to win 41 division titles and seven Super Bowls since the early 1990s.

Payton’s extension should also lay to rest speculation that arose in the off-season about his long-term intentions when it was revealed he had bought a mansion in suburban Dallas and his family was moving there. Though Payton did his best to tamp down fears among Saints fans that signaled a desire on the part of their team’s best head coach to ply his trade elsewhere, there were still rumblings among the Saints faithful that Payton had one eye on the Cowboys’ job.

“The speculation arises from that more than anything else,” Payton insisted at the NFL owners meeting in New Orleans last March. “It’s not a big topic otherwise.”

Still, a contract extension had been a big topic among Saints executives, Loomis confirmed.

“It’s been in the works for a little bit of time,” he said, adding it was the club that initiated extension talks.

Loomis declined to provide details, but did say the deal in no way reflected any fear Payton could win up coaching somewhere else in the near future.

“It’s important clearly,” Loomis said. “Sean is a large part of the success of our club the last five years, but I don’t think going to another team is part of the consideration here at all. Sean clearly wanted to remain the head coach of the New Orleans Saints. We clearly wanted him to remain the coach of the New Orleans Saints. It was just a matter of working out details.”

Loomis confirmed what Brees has also said on more than one occasion, namely that talks are ongoing between the quarterback and the club about a deal that is expected to make Brees among the highest paid players in football. Judging from contracts signed recently by New England’s Tom Brady and Indianapolis’ Peyton Manning, players who are also the heart and soul of their teams, Brees’ deal seems likely to be around $18 million a season. Brees will earn a $9.8 million base salary this season, the last year of his contract.

Payton said it is no secret Brees is next in line, but he said he did not think there was any preordained order to when the deals are concluded. In fact, a coach’s contract is generally a more streamlined document than a quarterback’s and thus it is no surprise his was wrapped up prior to Brees, according to Payton.

“The two didn’t really cross over at all,” Payton said of the parallel negotiations. “They’re two separate entities. I know there’s been discussions — I’m not really in that loop per se in regards to a player’s contract like Mickey would be. And yet we’ve got full confidence that’s coming and so this really wasn’t tied to that. It could have very easily happened in a different order and I think the contract that we did here with the club is a little bit simpler and less complicated than that would be of a player such as Drew Brees.”

Several players were still unaware of their coach’s deal when the Saints’ locker room opened up Monday afternoon, but the players were pleased and for the most part said continuity at the top does pay on-field dividends.

“I think if you’re here and you’re here long term as well — like myself, I’ve been here six years and I’ve gotten to have the same head coach, the same GM, and I think it’s important,” linebacker Scott Shanle said. Shanle and Brees are two of the eight players on the Saints’ roster who have been here for Payton’s entire tenure.

“But I think a lot of the time it really depends on how long you’ve been in one spot,” Shanle added. “None of us know how much longer you’re going to be anywhere. But I think if you’re a young player or a high draft pick and you know you’re going to be somewhere for three, four more years I think it’s encouraging when you see a team sign a GM or a coach to an extension that shows there’s certainty there and that always helps.”

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James Varney can be reached at jvarney@timespicayune.com or 504.717.1156.

Sean Payton plans to stick with the team that gave him his first shot as an NFL head coach for a few more years.

The Saints announced on Monday that Payton, who coached New Orleans to its first Super Bowl championship two seasons ago, has agreed to an extension through 2015.

The deal carries Payton through what would be his 10th season since he joined the Saints in 2006, shortly after the team’s miserable 3-13 2005 campaign that was defined in large part by its displacement to San Antonio because of Hurricane Katrina.

“It is good news, and I would start with it by recognizing the significant role that (general manager) Mickey Loomis and (owner) Tom Benson have had in not just this contract for me, but stability and the success we’ve had as an organization,” Payton said. “I’m very thankful to have that opportunity here for another five years.”

Including three trips to the postseason in his first five seasons, Payton has a 53-33 record with New Orleans. In his first season, he coached the Saints to their first NFC title game. In his fourth season, the Saints made the only Super Bowl appearance in the franchise’s 44-year history, beating the Indianapolis Colts.

“Our goal is to continue to build a tradition of winning here in New Orleans and Sean represents that tradition,” Benson said.

The terms of the contract were not released. Loomis would say only that it was “a good deal for Sean, a good deal for the club.”

During the past five seasons, Loomis has spoken of the strong working relationship he has with Payton and how important he thought that was to the club’s recent success.

“The relationship Sean and I have is pretty strong and I value it,” Loomis said Monday. “Obviously, I’m happy for the success that we’ve had here, really happy with the job that he’s done. … I’m just hoping it continues for a long, long time – not just this extension, but for years beyond it.”

AP

In his remarks to reporters Monday, Saints Coach Sean Payton revealed a handful of roster moves the club has made.

Offensive tackle William Robinson and guard Dennis Landolt were signed to practice squad deals, along with wide receiver Montez Billings who has bounced on-and-off the Saints practice squad roster for two years now.

To make room for that trio, the Saints released quarterback Sean Canfield, long snapper Kyle Nelson, and center Cecil Newton.

Payton also formally announced the arrival of tight end John Gilmore, who was given No. 89. Gilmore’s signing was reported Sunday. Linebacker Ramon Humber was released by the club to open up the roster spot for Gilmore.