Payton and Brees, стр. 28

10. The Grind: Putting Together the Plan

The tight ends room is located on the first floor of the New Orleans Saints training facility, across the hall from the squad room. As rooms go, it’s nondescript—four gray cinder block walls, a black door, and a black-gray carpet. It could pass for a classroom in your neighborhood elementary school if not for the floor-to-ceiling photographic mural of Jeremy Shockey on the wall behind tight ends coach Dan Campbell’s desk and the two motivational signs on each side of the room: New Orleans Saints Tight Ends Musts: Smart. Tough and Aggressive. Competitive. Relentless.

For the leading passer in NFL history, this is where the weekly grind of preparing for the upcoming opponent begins. For all intents and purposes, this is Drew Brees’ office at 5800 Airline Drive.

“Officially, it’s the tight ends room, but really it’s Drew Brees’ room,” Campbell joked.

Brees isn’t sure when the tight ends room became his de facto office, but he knows it was early in his Saints tenure. And he knows why: necessity and convenience. Since the quarterbacks are the only offensive position group without their own meeting room, they were forced to become wanderers for office space throughout the building. They’d alternate between meeting in Carmichael’s office or the offensive staff meeting room on the second floor. They eventually found themselves diving into the tight ends room every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning after the main team meeting when the tight ends attended special teams meetings. Its central location saved them time and energy from traversing the stairs to the main film room on the second floor during game weeks.

Over the years, Brees adopted it as his preferred spot to evaluate film. During the season, he spends a good portion of his weekday mornings breaking down game tape here. Consequently, the tight ends room is now outfitted with an espresso machine that serves Brees’ favorite coffee and has a large cardboard cutout of his smiling face displayed on the wall, a prop Campbell preserved from one of Brees’ post-practice quarterback competitions.

NFL work weeks follow a similar schedule. Tuesday is a long day for the coaching staff, a full day of film study and meetings to compile the plan for the base offense, the first- and second-down plays that will be run against the upcoming opponent. It’s an off day for the players: time to rest, recover, and enjoy with family and friends. For Brees, it’s a full day of work. He typically gets to the facility before dawn and doesn’t leave until after dark.

While Campbell and the rest of the offensive staff are meeting collectively upstairs on the second floor, Brees is one floor below with the other quarterbacks, studying video of the upcoming opponent’s last three games and any other games coaches deem relevant.

Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays begin at 6 or 6:30 am to account for practice sessions in the afternoon. The film study sessions on these days corresponds to the specific daily install of the game plan. Wednesdays are what is known as base offense—first and second down—so the group will not only watch all the video of every first and second down the opposing defense has played in the past three games, but also specialized cut-ups of every blitz or pressure package they’ve run during those downs over a longer period of time. They do the same thing on Thursday for third downs and Friday for specialty situations: red zone, short yardage, goal line, and two-minute. The idea is for the film study session to inform the quarterbacks of the plays the coaching staff will install for practice that afternoon.

Film study is serious stuff for Brees. He takes notes in a journal throughout the sessions and forbids any conversation that doesn’t pertain to the task at hand. If the other quarterbacks want to talk about the great dunk from the Pelicans game the night before or the great restaurant they plan to hit with their wives that evening for dinner, they need to do it before or after film study. As the unquestioned leader of the group, Brees sets the tone.

“Once we turn the film on, it’s all business,” Hill said.

Brees is so locked in during his film study sessions, he often doesn’t even notice when Campbell ducks in to grab something from his desk or file cabinet.

“I have my routine and I really just zone everything else out,” Brees said.

The intensity and breadth of Brees’ film study sessions often stun newcomers and rookies when they encounter them for the first time. The tedious attention to detail and sheer time involved require extraordinary mental stamina. Some quarterbacks simply can’t handle the grind, Daniel and Hill being the exceptions.

“It’s intense,” Daniel said. “He takes what he does very seriously, and a lot of guys that come into the league or that come from different teams, they just they don’t get it, and they don’t understand it. But his intensity makes everyone around him want to be that way because they understand how much he cares. That sets a tone for the team and people feed off that. Some quarterbacks are these happy-go-lucky guys. That’s not Drew. He’s a guy that you can go to war with.”

Brees doesn’t simply watch film. He scrutinizes it with the precision and intensity of a gem cutter. He methodically goes through each play, scanning the defense for any kind of “tell” he can find in a defender’s body language or alignment. During video cut-ups of an opponent’s third-down defense and blitz packages, he might rewind a single play two dozen times as he studies each of the 11 defenders and their alignment and positioning and jots down notes to himself in his journal. It’s a tedious, time-consuming task and Brees takes