SmashMouth

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It wasn't a particularly special play in New Orleans Saints lore -- or at least you wouldn't think so. Just a 6-yard touchdown run by Mark Ingram in the first quarter of a 2016 win against Tampa Bay.

But NFL Films had Sean Payton and Drew Brees mic'd up for that game and captured them relaying that playcall through the headset and into the huddle. So I used it as an example when each of them agreed to sit down and dissect just what exactly they're talking about when they rattle off these cryptic, almost comically long sets of code words.



When I read it off to Brees to see if he could remember when the Saints might have used it, his instant recall was as mind-boggling as the terminology itself.

"I feel like we've called that play twice," said the 39-year-old quarterback, who is heading into his 13th season with Payton in New Orleans. "I recall we ran one of those plays against Tampa like two years ago and scored on it."

Wait. Can he do that with every play?

"I'd say I've got pretty good recall on most plays -- but especially ones like that one, which was a bit of a specialty play," said Brees, who explained that the Saints called two plays in the huddle in that instance, hoping they would get the right defensive look to "sucker" the Buccaneers into a misdirection run.

"But we could just sit there and go through a call sheet and just go play after play, and I could give you the history of it as we've been with the Saints," Brees continued. "And I could probably rattle off that same playcall in certain games in critical situations. 'Man, this was a game-changer. Or this was a game winner and this was this and that was that. Or this guy made this adjustment on this play.'"