Payton and Brees, стр. 24

The analogy Payton uses to describe Brees is that he’s the guy who, when buying a new car, always gets the deluxe model with the bells and whistles on the dashboard. Where he differs from most people is “he actually learns what each button does and then masters how to use it.”

“It’s almost to a fault with him,” Payton said. “He’s going to know the line calls and the assignment of everyone on offense. If you’re not careful, he’s got the filet on the grill at Emeril’s but he’s taking a peek at the banana cream pie. You’re like whoa, whoa, whoa. But we have a lot of volume here because we can put a lot on Drew, and he’s able to handle it.”

The Brees Supercomputer gives the Saints the ability to construct offensive game plans that seem brand-new to their opponent each week but are still easily digestible for their offensive players. The plays stay the same, but the Saints make them look different by tinkering with the alignments or changing the formation. Along with varying their formations and alignments, the Saints also get creative with the routes themselves—both the combinations and the players who run them.

The idea is to keep defenses guessing. And the staff leans heavily on Brees to communicate these nuances to the other 10 offensive players before the snap and get the Saints in and out of the right play at the line of scrimmage.

“We have a base offense, and then we evolve, and build off of that offense,” Brees said. “We are very game-plan oriented, so each and every week, there are very few calls replicated from the week before, and if they are, it’s new shifts, motions, formations, personnel groups potentially.”

These modifications create a heavy burden for the Saints offensive personnel during game-week preparation. It’s one of the reasons the Saints personnel department places such a heavy emphasis on football IQ and intelligence in their scouting reports on prospective offensive skill-position players.

“We change our formations up quite a bit, just to try to disguise looks, whether it’s a shift or a motion to make it look different even though it’s the same to us,” Carmichael said.

Former Saints quarterback Luke McCown played for four teams in the nine seasons before he joined the Saints in 2013. He said he’s never seen anything like the offensive complexity the Saints employed on weekly basis under Payton and Brees.

“It’s not like they call the same plays every week,” McCown said. “Sean comes up with a whole new game plan every week for that particular defense and those schemes that he’s seeing. And then for the execution to work out the way it does on Drew’s end is remarkable. I played for a bunch of different teams and offenses, and I’d never seen that before. It’s remarkable.”

Strief estimated the Saints add six to eight new tag concepts each season. Multiply that by the 14 years Brees and Payton have been together in New Orleans, and it’s easy to see why the Saints offense is a massive learning challenge for players, especially newcomers to the system.

“It can get complicated very, very quickly, and that is the evolution of the offense, because all of those answers, all of those problems are still in the offense,” Strief said. “[Former Saints receiver] Lance Moore talks all the time about how this offense is so different than anywhere else. And there’s just so much stuff. They’re not in the playbook, but they’re in the offense because those two guys [Brees and Payton] remember that. Once it’s in, it’s in. Those two guys have been building the same offense for now [14] years, and that has made this very complicated for a lot of guys.”

This offensive evolution wasn’t intentional and it certainly didn’t happen overnight. The process is 14 years in development. As Brees grew more familiar with Payton’s scheme during his early years in the system, the playbook gradually expanded. His learning capacity staggered the Saints offensive staff. The more the coaches gave him, the more he ate it up. The staff quickly started to realize Brees was a different animal than anyone they had encountered before. His brain was seemingly incapable of being overloaded. And so they kept adding more to the playbook until they came up with the sprawling amalgamation they have today.

“There’s a lot of people in the NFL that believe less is more, and that’s okay—that works, too,” Campbell said. “But not when you’ve got a quarterback like ours. The candy shop is open with him. More is more with him.”

Dome-ination:

2008 Green Bay Packers

While the New Orleans Saints led the NFL in total offense and advanced to the NFC Championship Game in the first season of the Payton-Brees era, the offense didn’t fully come into its own until Year Three. By 2008, Drew Brees had full command of the offense and Sean Payton had added a fleet of playmakers to the attack: Reggie Bush, Marques Colston, Robert Meachem, Lance Moore, Pierre Thomas, and Jeremy Shockey. And while the 8–8 record didn’t reflect it, the Saints were building into an offensive machine. That year, the Saints led the NFL in total yards (6,571) and scoring (463 points), the first time in franchise history they’d led the league in both categories in the same season. And Brees became just the second quarterback in NFL history to pass for more than 5,000 yards in a season. He fell just 15 yards shy of Dan Marino’s then-NFL record of 5,084 yards and was named the NFL Offensive Player of the Year, the first Saints player to ever win the award.

The first real glimpse of the Payton-Brees juggernaut came on November 24, 2008. In a Monday night game against the Green Bay Packers, the Saints delivered a 51–29 beatdown before a national television audience.

The Packers were coming off a 13–3 season in Mike McCarthy’s third year as head coach. They entered the game on the heels of a 37–3 rout of the Chicago Bears