Payton and Brees, стр. 80
In a way, Brees’ partnership with Payton might have hurt his case in some corners. Because of Payton’s play-calling aptitude, Brees often is labeled as a “system quarterback” by detractors. It’s a tag that’s hounded him throughout his playing career, from Westlake High School to Purdue to the NFL. The fact that the Saints went 5–0 without Brees during the 2019 season was not lost on his skeptics. Of course, the same could be said of the New England Patriots, who went 11–5 in 2008 without Tom Brady.
And while Brady (Rob Gronkowski, Randy Moss) and Manning (Marshall Faulk, Marvin Harrison) each benefited from Hall of Fame–worthy teammates, Brees might be the only Saint in the Payton era to earn that distinction. Before Mike Thomas and Alvin Kamara joined the team, the Saints managed to rank among the league leaders annually in total offense and scoring offense with just one Pro Bowl player in the perimeter corps (Jimmy Graham in 2011).
“People can say and think whatever they want,” Strief said. “Put that guy [Brees] in any system in the NFL, and he’s going to excel…Brady is the same way. They’re the same person. To claim that he is a product of the system because we throw the ball a lot and he gets a lot of yards is preposterous. He is the system. The stuff that we are running is the same stuff that other teams are running. We are not running magical plays. We have a quarterback that on the last step of his drop already knows where the ball needs to go and when, and can put it in a window twice the size of a football. That is the system.”
Quarterback coach Trent Dilfer went so far as to call Brees a “transformational” player at the quarterback position. While Fran Tarkenton and Doug Flutie enjoyed successful careers before him, Brees’ spectacular career has changed the way coaches and front office executives view quarterbacks. He paved the way for a generation of 6’0”-and-under passers to become franchise quarterbacks. Without Brees’ success, Russell Wilson and Kyler Murray might have suffered the same fate as Charlie Ward, who was forced to pursue a professional basketball career in the NBA because of the NFL’s skepticism of a quarterback with his size and playing style when he came out of Florida State in 1994.
“Drew changed the narrative from quarterbacking is about being big to quarterbacking is about making everyone around you better, completing the ball,” Dilfer said on the MMQB podcast with Albert Breer in 2019.
Before Brees, Dilfer said, many NFL coaches, scouts, and personnel executives subscribed to the theory that size mattered for quarterbacks. To succeed at the game’s most important position, quarterbacks had to be big and strong, with a great arm and able to throw the deep out pattern.
“Drew changed that,” said Dilfer, who won a Super Bowl ring as the starting quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens and now trains elite quarterback prospects at Nike’s prestigious Elite 11 camps. “He showed that you could throw it earlier, you didn’t have to throw it harder. It wasn’t about seeing over everyone, it was about seeing through passing lanes. It was about being a surgeon not a butcher. He literally looks at every little detail, every minuscule aspect of quarterbacking and perfects it.”
Dilfer uses highlights of Brees’ work as a teaching tape at his camps. Brees’ mastery of the position’s fundamentals makes him the perfect model for young players.
“Drew is really the first 6-foot surgeon, the first guy that meticulously took you apart with how he played the position and made you bleed out by a thousand cuts,” Dilfer said. “He made your offense more robust because you do more things than just turn your back to the line of scrimmage and rip heaters down the field.… I think Drew will forever be in that conversation as one of the greatest quarterbacks that’s ever played the game when you look at quarterbacking holistically. Quarterbacking is making your team better, production, the leadership, impact on your franchise, the legacy on players that came after him that tried to be just like him.”
Tom House works with half the starting quarterbacks in the NFL and has coached scores of others over the years. Brees, he said, competes and learns on a different level than any quarterback he’s ever trained, including Brady. Brees routinely grades in the top percentile on the testing House and his staff perform during offseason training workouts at the 3DQB facility in Huntington Beach, California.
“What Drew does, he makes it look easy, but it’s not,” House said. “The window is that big and he hits it. Drew will have a spectacular play or two, but he’s not a spectacular quarterback. He’s just the best fucker who’s ever thrown a football.”
Pro Football Reference’s approximate value metric might be the best argument for how grossly underrated Brees has been in his career. The statistic attempts to rank NFL players’ overall value across positions and eras by measuring their production, tenure, and honors in each season that they played. Entering the 2020 season, Brees ranked as the third-best player in NFL history, trailing only Manning and Brady. He is the only offensive player in the Top 15 who has not won MVP honors.
“It’s so frustrating to me,” said Mike Neu, the former Saints quarterbacks coach and now head coach at Ball State University. “For whatever reason, he never gets enough respect. There’s no question that he has had an impact on all of sports, not just football and not just the quarterback position. He’s just a machine.”
The same could be said for the Saints offense. They’ve rewritten the club and NFL record books and, by any statistical measure, deserve to be mentioned with the greatest offensive juggernauts in league lore, alongside the Rams’ Greatest Show on Turf, the Air Coryell Chargers, the Brady-Belichick Patriots, and the Walsh-Montana 49ers.
Since Brees and Payton joined forces, the Saints have gained more