Payton and Brees, стр. 48
The 577 yards were the most the Giants had surrendered in their modern history. The last time they allowed that many yards in a game was in 1948, when the Chicago Cardinals totaled 579 yards in a 63–35 win at the Polo Grounds.
“The statistics are alarming to me,” NFL analyst Jon Gruden said during the ESPN broadcast. “I’ve never seen offensive numbers thrown up like Drew Brees, Sean Payton, and the New Orleans Saints. The statistics are amazing. When you get a great quarterback and a great coach and you surround them with great skills players, this kind of thing is possible.”
Brees completed 24 of 38 passes for 363 yards and four touchdowns. He wasn’t sacked and was hit just four times in 41 dropbacks. His eight-yard scoring run in the third quarter was part of a rushing attack that netted 205 yards and averaged 6.8 yards a carry.
“There’s that confidence that players around him have, and obviously we have in him,” Payton said afterward of Brees. “He made some fantastic throws tonight.”
The blowout loss was a wake-up call for the Giants, who went on to win seven of their next nine games and upset the New England Patriots 21–17 in Super Bowl XLIV.
15. Fighting the Stereotype
Luke McCown remembers the moment Drew Brees convinced him he was inhuman.
To be precise, it was at the 2:55 mark of the third quarter in the Saints’ Week 10 game against the San Francisco 49ers on November 9, 2014. On a third-and-6 play from the 49ers’ 11, something very rare happened as Brees retreated into the shotgun formation. The 49ers fooled him. They overloaded their defensive alignment to the strong side of the Saints offensive formation, then attacked with a blitz from the weak side. Normally Brees is an expert at identifying such tactics. But this time, the Niners’ subterfuge worked.
Safety Eric Reid and linebacker Michael Wilhoite both went unblocked as they converged at full speed on Brees in the Saints backfield. The pair was on him so quickly Brees barely had reached the top of his three-step drop when he was forced to react. Wilhoite had a direct bead on Brees and went in for the kill. Brees instinctively planted his right foot in the turf, juked to his left, and dipped his right shoulder as Wilhoite flew by to his right. The move took Brees directly into the path of the onrushing Reid, who never broke stride and lowered his head to deliver a knockout blow. Brees instinctively pirouetted at the 20-yard line and spun in a complete 360 to his right, causing Reid to completely whiff and take out the befuddled Wilhoite at the same time. Brees then re-gathered himself, reset his eyes downfield, and lofted an 11-yard touchdown pass to Jimmy Graham in the end zone.
“Wizardry from Drew Brees!” said play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt on the Fox Sports broadcast, which panned to a shot of defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, standing hands on hips, staring incredulously down at the field from the coaches’ box.
Brees had just conducted a magic trick, something straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Three stories below Fangio, McCown stood on the Saints sideline in awe.
Did he just do that?! McCown remembers thinking. “You’ve got to be kidding me. It was like he was Luke Skywalker and just turned invisible on them.”
It would be one thing if Brees’ Houdini act were an isolated incident, a one-off in his 19-year career. But he’s performed these magic acts so many times the Saints offensive coaches have a phrase for it: the Brees Jedi Mind Trick.
There was the spin move he put on Robert Alford and Bryan Poole to leave the Falcons secondary tandem in his dust at the 5-yard line in Week 3 of the 2018 season. And the crafty juke he laid on Jimmy Smith four weeks later to cause the Ravens cornerback to whiff as an unblocked blitzer on a blind-side sack attempt, after which Brees found Dan Arnold for a 10-yard gain. The list goes on and on.
“I could pull up half a dozen of those plays on film,” Lombardi said. “He does a shoulder twitch and guys fly by him like he’s not there. It’s become a joke in the quarterback room. I don’t know how he does it.”
Analysts and scouts have used myriad adjectives to describe Brees’ brilliance over the years, among them: cerebral, accurate, poised, driven. But few have ever portrayed him as an athlete—a runs-fast, jumps-high, throws-hard type player. Most often, he is characterized as an overachieving, unathletic gym rat. But make no mistake, Brees is a great, great athlete.
Ask anyone in the New Orleans locker room about Brees’ athletic skills, and you’ll hear a litany of testimonies. He’s not just the unquestioned leader of the Saints, he’s also one of the best athletes on the entire team. Brees might lack elite straight-line speed—he ran a pedestrian 4.85-second 40-yard dash at the 2001 NFL Scouting Combine—but the rest of his athletic skills are way above average, even by NFL standards. He recorded a vertical leap of 32 inches at the NFL Scouting Combine, better than Derrius Guice (31.5), Tarik Cohen (31.5), Cooper Kupp (31.0), and Calvin Ridley (31.0). His time of 7.09 seconds in the three-cone drill was also very good, better than Teddy Bridgewater’s 7.17.
One of the most enduring memories of the 2009 Super Bowl season was Brees, in helmet and full pads, dunking the ball over the goal post while celebrating a touchdown he scored on a quarterback sneak in the Saints’ comeback win against the Miami Dolphins in Week 6.
“What is mislabeled is his athleticism,” Payton says. “He’s a rare athlete. When you look at his foot agility, his release, his accuracy, and the fact he has hands as big as mitts, he’s got a skill set that is perfect for the position. He’s an amazing athlete.”
Part of Brees’ problem, of course, is perception.