burningmetal

I'm sorry, but my anti hero-worship censor compels me to refute this nonsense. I've been reading comments like this one for weeks and refraining from getting into an argument about it, but I can't deal with this anymore without responding.

You have said for YEARS (and I've been refuting your arguments for all of those years) that the Saints would be sunk at any such time that Brees is no longer on the team. Then you saw this team go 5-0 without him, looking actually MORE efficient at times, even if in a different way, and you STILL come in here and proclaim that this team is dead without him.

When Drew was in his prime, it was great. None of us wanted to see it end, because during that time he was probably the greatest QB the game has ever seen, regardless of whatever mystical reasons that people tried to argue in favor of anyone else. But that time HAS come to an end. Prime Brees is no longer here. He's a good QB, and can have moments of brilliance. The Saints won't suck if he stays for another year. But to say that it might be decades before the Saints find another QB as good as he is NOW? If that happens, then it will mean that the front office is full of idiots.

This is a game now built for offense, and nothing but offense. Ryan Tannehill just made the Pro Bowl. Let's see a raise of hands on how many people thought he was capable of anything remotely good? He left an awful organization, got put in a system that utilized his skill-set, and protected him with a dominant running game so that he wouldn't have to carry his team, and that was the trick. But he's not going to win a game that is totally on his shoulders.

Such is the case, currently, with Brees. He's not the guy that can carry you when you need him to. Certainly, at the very least, not to the extent that he used to be able to. So should the Saints just play out the string with Brees, and be happy to be good for now, but come up short every year in the biggest games, or should they start developing someone for the future? My answer to that, is if the right guy falls in your lap, you take him, and let him learn from Brees. He's not playing till he's 45. And if he does, I'm afraid it's not going to be pretty.

This team has a core that can win. I'd rather try to maximize the years that this core has, than to wait for Drew to wither into a shell of himself like Favre and Peyton did, because we're too afraid to move on from our hero. Those guys ended their careers on different teams than they started with, because their organizations weren't afraid of a change. You won't always get the result you want, but you have to accept that no QB is going to play forever.

I've seen the question "who's out there who you'd replace him with" raised numerous times. That's not at all the question that should be asked. You look to the draft. And to that end, the question should be how long do we wait to start looking in that direction to develop someone like the 49ers did with Steve Young, and the Packers with Rodgers, or whatever historical example you want to give. There is never a guarantee that anything is going to work. Is that a valid reason to wait for it to implode, rather than be proactive? I think not.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that, the NFL would fine and suspend me.