SmashMouth

No team has improved its playoff odds more over the past month than the New Orleans Saints, who the Football Power Index estimated to hold a 5.1 percent shot of hitting the postseason after an 0-2 start. After rolling off a pair of impressive victories before their bye and winning a rollicking encounter against the Lions in Week 6, the 3-2 Saints are now favorites to make their way back into the postseason, with a 62.9 percent chance of playing past Week 17.

Naturally, the player at the heart of the Saints is quarterback Drew Brees. In writing about the league's potential MVP candidates after Week 4, it felt as if we were almost taking Brees for granted, given that he had arguably the best numbers in football.

Over the past three games, though, a defense that had served as a punchline has shown signs of life. The Saints have jumped from 31st in defensive DVOA after Week 2 to 15th, lofty heights for a unit that has ranked either last or second-to-last in the league in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Dennis Allen's unit has produced shocking numbers over its past three games, but even if the defense can't keep it up, the Saints might only need to be competent to challenge for the NFC South crown. Few quarterbacks have needed -- and gotten -- less from their defenses to succeed than the 38-year-old the Saints have under center.



Help out Brees -- just a little bit

No quarterback of this generation has gotten less help from his defense than Brees. It's backed up by the numbers. I looked at every quarterback to begin their career since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger and found each season in which they were the primary starter for their team. I took the points allowed by each team and standardized them against the averages for each year in question, making it possible to compare quarterback defenses across eras

There have been 38 quarterbacks to start 10 or more seasons since the merger. Brees has the sixth-worst average defense over that period, and the worst of any active quarterback. Here are the quarterbacks with the 10 worst defenses, their average standardized score, and what that would translate to in terms of a 2016 defense:

PLAYER AVG DEF 2016 PPG
Archie Manning 0.80 25.5
Jim Everett 0.74 25.3
Dan Fouts 0.70 25.1
Boomer Esiason 0.65 25.0
Steve DeBerg 0.50 24.5
Drew Brees 0.47 24.4
Jim Plunkett 0.40 24.1
Vinny Testaverde 0.28 23.7
Jake Plummer 0.25 23.6
Warren Moon 0.21 23.5

read more here

Attached Thumbnails