Payton and Brees, стр. 15
“I was a skinny, runt-looking kid,” Brees said. “I just had my knee surgery a couple of months before and had this big ole brace on [my leg]. I wouldn’t have recruited me, either.”
In the end, Brees’ only Division I scholarship offers came from Purdue and Kentucky, a pair of schools known more for their basketball programs than football prowess. Brees picked Purdue because of its Big Ten affiliation and strong academic reputation. Even when Applewhite spurned A&M for Texas and the Aggies made late advances, Brees stuck with his decision. It proved to be a fortuitous call.
The Boilermakers’ new coach, Joe Tiller, was an offensive guru, one of the innovators of the spread offense. When he took the job, he promised fans the Boilermakers would play an exciting brand of offensive football. He called it “basketball on grass.”
When Brees arrived at Purdue, there were six quarterbacks on the roster. His goal was to redshirt and maybe make the travel squad. But one by one, the players ahead of him fell by the wayside. Senior John Reeves switched to defense, redshirt freshman Clay Walters and true freshman Jim Mitchell transferred, and true freshman Ben Smith switched to the secondary.
That left senior Billy Dicken as the starter and Brees as the backup. Brees played sparingly as a freshman, but by the spring of his sophomore year, he was the only experienced quarterback on the roster and he took 90 percent of the snaps in practice.
When it was time to make his collegiate debut, Brees was more than ready. With his pinpoint accuracy and quick decision-making, Brees thrived in Tiller’s pass-happy offense and burst on the college scene. Tiller’s innovative attack and Brees’ innate field generalship were a match made in passing heaven.
In his first season as a starter, he threw for more yards (3,983), more touchdowns (39), and a better completion percentage (63.4) than more heralded peers Donovan McNabb of Syracuse, Akili Smith of Oregon, Cade McNown of UCLA, Joe Germaine of Ohio State, and Michael Bishop of Kansas State. And he led Purdue to a 9–4 season, capped by an Alamo Bowl victory over Bishop and K-State.
He took the offense to another level in his junior season. In a 31–24 loss to Wisconsin, Brees attempted an NCAA-record 83 passes, completing an NCAA-record-tying 55 of them for 494 yards. In a 56–21 win against Minnesota, he went 31-for-36 for 522 yards and six touchdowns.
As a senior, he led Purdue to its first Rose Bowl appearance in 34 years and its first Big Ten title since 1967. And along the way, he set two NCAA records, 13 Big Ten records, and 19 school records. Brees won the Maxwell Award as the nation’s top collegiate player and was a two-time finalist for the Heisman Trophy. He finished his career as the Big Ten’s all-time passing leader with 11,792 yards and 90 touchdowns, numbers that still stand atop the conference’s career rankings today.
In the spring of 2001, as Brees prepared for the NFL Draft, he encountered similar criticisms to the ones he heard as a senior at Westlake. Once again, Brees found himself in prove-it mode.
NFL scouts worried about his lack of height, pedestrian speed, and average arm. Some believed he was the product of Tiller’s system, which tended to turn average quarterbacks into world-beaters. Billy Dicken, who started during Brees’ freshman season, played sparingly before Tiller arrived, but passed for 3,136 yards and 25 touchdowns in his one season as a starter under Tiller and was named first-team All-Big Ten.
Years earlier, Tiller’s offense had produced another record-setting quarterback named Josh Wallwork. At the University of Wyoming in 1996, Wallwork led the nation in total offense but never cracked the NFL. Instead, he toiled in the Arena Football League.
At the time, the comparisons to Brees seemed valid. Both were undersized, athletic quarterbacks with quick decision-making skills. But off the field, the two quarterbacks could not have been more dissimilar. Wallwork lacked the intangibles that made Brees so special. Wallwork’s drug problems eventually destroyed his career and led to an eight-month jail sentence for meth possession.
Still, Wallwork’s success caused some football people to wonder if Brees was also a product of Tiller’s system.
“I think it’s a combination of both [the system and the player],” Minnesota coach Glen Mason said at the time. “I don’t have as short a memory as a lot of people. That offense didn’t take off just when Drew Brees came. The senior [Dicken] that didn’t play [prior to Brees]. He really performed well in that system. I think it’s a combination of a really talented quarterback that’s running an offense that’s suited for him. It’s a great marriage.”
Tiller, though, insisted Brees would star in any system and told every NFL scout as much when they visited campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, to evaluate Brees.
“Certainly our system is user-friendly and he happens to be the user right now,” Tiller said in 2001. “If you want to put a percentage on it, I really don’t know. I just know that he’s the right guy for our system, particularly at this time. But the system is not making Drew Brees.”
Brees fared well at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. He measured 6’0⅛” in bare feet. His time of 4.85 in the 40-yard dash was below par but far from awful. His vertical jump of 32 inches was above average, and his hand size (10.25-inch width) ranked in the top 10 percent of quarterbacks. His ball speed of 68 miles per hour on his passes topped the quarterback class that year, according to Tom Braatz, the director of college scouting for the Miami Dolphins.
“Drew has been a very productive quarterback in college,” Rick Spielman, the Dolphins’ vice president of player personnel, told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 2001. “Everybody knows the biggest question on Drew is whether you can live with the height or not. We’re going to have to sit