I guess everyone should be pulling for Matt Ryan to be healthy for that game. Matt Shaub got them closer to victory then they've been in a while. Not that their game was ever in doubt. But, you know... Relatively speaking.

Matt Ryan has become an empty stat guy. Makes all kinds of mistakes, and when their defense inevitably implodes, he starts piling on the garbage yards.

Matt Ryan is not the problem there. He is essentially having the same kind of season that Brees had between 2014 to 2016.

People would make this same remark about Brees putting up "empty stats" when we'd lose and he'd have a high QBR and Dan Marino-esque numbers. 5 years ago, we would be going ballistic on Saints forums talking about stat guys dissing on Brees for putting up great numbers in losses.

I know we hate on the Falcons as a rival, but Ryan definitely is not the problem.

The game was close cause they were playing the Seahawks - a team that always plays down to their competition and looks underwhelming when they are big favorites. Seattle has won 5 of their 6 games by a combined 15 points. 7 of them were against the Falcons, and all of these games have been against trash teams.

Schaub isn't going to win them more games than Ryan would.

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.

It's totally possible for a QB to play amazing and still lose cause their defense sucks. Dan Marino was the greatest historical case for this until Brees' prime was wasted with us fielding god awful defenses.

During Marino's prime, the Dolphins had a bottom 4 league worst defense in 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1989. Sound familiar? Brees had the same prime and Marino also no doubt wins a 2nd MVP in 1986 when he had 42+ TDs and a monster season. Marino also set the record for lowest sack percentage in NFL history in 1988 and 1989, but it didn't matter cause the Dolphins' defenses were pathetic and weren't going to help him win games. Brees had a very similar problem with our team fielding league worst defenses for years.

Guys always love to talk about Brees being robbed an MVP. It's not Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers or Patrick Mahomes' fault - it was these crappy defenses during Brees' prime. Brees' absolute peak was wasted with us fielding god awful defenses.

Brees would've won an MVP, possibly 2 by now if we just put a competent team around him in the years of 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016. That was his prime.

The 2012 team was averaging 28.5 points a game, but they went 7-9 cause the defense was historically bad.


The stats disagree with you.

Week 6 (2019) Passing Stats: Matt Ryan In A Losing Effort

Ryan had the absolute most value of a QB in that week they ended up losing to the Cardinals. His comeback erased by a missed extra point. Over on FiveThirtyEight group discussion articles, they were talking about how he's pretty much having a season like Brees used to have.


Brees used to be the king of the type of season that Ryan is having now. It's actually kinda funny that Falcons fans are getting a taste of this medicine after they spent years making fun of us enduring these heartbreaking losses with a QB putting up amazing numbers.

Five Thirty Eight wrote this brilliant article in 2017 about how the Saints awful defenses pretty much wasted Brees' prime.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...aints-defense/