A few things here: I didn't say Ryan was THE problem, I said he makes a lot of mistakes and piles on the stats when the game is over. That has been accurate. It wasn't always that way with him, but over the last couple of years it is. He's had talent around him on offense, and yet he has been mistake prone.

And like it or not, Drew Brees did put up some empty numbers during those down years. I was on here during that time saying as much, and people didn't like me very much for it, or at least that was my impression. In no way, however, did I say that Drew wasn't still a top flight QB. It was just that he was chunking the ball around more than ever due to our bad defense, and I was trying to make the point that, as much fun as it was to see Drew put up numbers, and as much as we love the guy, it would be better to have a game manager at QB and a top 5 defense, than to continue to be bottom of the league in defense and continue to pile up yards on offense that weren't leading to wins. People took that as me blaming the losses on Drew, but they were missing my point, entirely. It wasn't his fault, and in a perfect world you could have Drew AND a great defense. The point was always that the Saints needed a better defense, and they would need more balance on offense to help control the ball.

And if you ever wanted to know what that would look like, we got to see it for five weeks with Teddy Bridgewater, a much improved ground attack, very limited turnovers, and a dominant defense... 5-0. Now that Drew is back, they are going to be even better. And over the last couple of years since the Saints drafted Kamara and put together a real defense, the team has been winning, even though Drew hasn't put up the same eye popping stats he used to. He's not playing worse. He's just FAR more efficient because he doesn't have to force the issue.

So the point about Drew back then was not that he wasn't good, it was that his numbers were inflated and somewhat misleading. With Matt Ryan, how often are the Falcons even in games? I don't remember the Saints being consistently blown out a few years ago.

I'm not saying Shaub will win the Falcons more games. I don't know if either QB will win another game for them this season. But sometimes having a veteran backup come in and just take advantage of what the defense gives them can help an offense who's starter is trying to be a hero and making things worse. Matt Ryan is not Drew Brees. The pressure of having to score 30 a game just to be competitive does not appear to be something he handles very well.

In no way does Shaub worry me. I just think he might be a little more settled at this point. He knows he's not going to get many more chances to play.

But Brees isn’t the reason the Saints have lost 27 games in three seasons — the defense is. Among all 32 teams from 2014 to 2016, the Saints ranked 28th, 32nd and 31st in points allowed per game, respectively. Over those three seasons, the Saints gave up 28.2 points on average in Brees’s starts — that’s practically a touchdown more than the league average during that time (22.7). No other current starting quarterback in this time period has nearly this high a hurdle to clear to get a win.1 The three quarterbacks with the most wins during that time — Tom Brady (35), Aaron Rodgers (32) and Russell Wilson (32) — have defenses that have allowed an average of 18.6, 22.1 and 17.1 points per game, respectively.2
Let’s pretend for a second that New Orleans had an average defense — not even a good one — over the past three seasons. If the actual points surrendered by the Saints in each of the 47 games that Brees started in 2014-16 were replaced with the league average for the season, how many more games would Brees have won?



Among the 47 games Brees started in the past three seasons, the Saints would have won 10 more games (technically, they would have won 12 games they actually lost and lost two they had actually won, for a net increase of 10). In both 2014 and 2016, Brees’s record would have been 11-5, and New Orleans would have made the playoffs. To be sure, this is just a back-of-the-napkin calculation, and several variables can distort this expected-win statistic — for instance, Brees and the Saints probably wouldn’t have scored as much if they hadn’t been constantly losing.

But when you look at all the non-Brees starting quarterbacks who also started from 2014 to 2016, the connection between clearing the league-average point total and winning games is quite strong: The quarterbacks in our sample average 0.97 wins for every one time they clear that bar. Brees, on the other hand, registered 0.68 wins for his better-than-average offensive days. Matthew Stafford is the anti-Brees in this regard: The Detroit Lions’ QB has 27 wins since 2014 despite leading an offense that beat the league-average point total just 19 times.