Drew Brees On The Block?

HE can't play in Jersey. Way too cold for him. 

With the release of Graham, they could be cleaning house down there. Doubtful, but interesting if they are. I'm not sure how old he is now, but you could probably count on him for about 3 more years or so.

I'd have to agree, not the long term answer, but instant respectability, and back to the playoffs.

There was a recent ESPN Insder article about this if you care:

The case for trading Drew Brees
How Saints could become the first 'tanking' test case in the NFL

This is not going to be a good offseason for the New Orleans Saints. The Saints have signed a number of big contracts in recent years, trying to return to the Super Bowl, and those moves have not worked out. Now it's time to pay the salary-cap piper.

Even after this week's moves to cut Pierre Thomas and restructure Jairus Byrd's contract, and taking into account the news reports that Marques Colston and Brodrick Bunkley have restructured or are in the process of restructuring their contracts, the Saints are still over the 2015 cap. They could save that money with other contract restructures (or cuts), but that would just do more to push dead money onto their cap in future years. The nature of the NFL is such that teams can always find a way to get under the cap, but each year, it will become more difficult to add new talent to the Saints roster. At some point, the whole thing will need to be blown up.

Why not just do it now?

We're used to the idea of "tanking" in other sports. The Philadelphia 76ers have amassed a roster filled with young but undeveloped talent, not to mention more second-round picks than there are stalls at Reading Terminal Market. The Houston Astros have spent the last couple of years trading nearly all of their veterans for young prospects. The Saints are in a unique position to try an experiment, and to see if such a strategy might work in the National Football League.

How could the Saints do this? By trading away Drew Brees.


At age 36, Brees has one to three years left as a top NFL quarterback. Given the Saints' current salary-cap restrictions and aging talent, they need to ask themselves if they can truly put a championship-level team around him during those three seasons. If they can't, there definitely are teams that can. Teams like Houston, St. Louis and even Buffalo have strong defenses and young offensive talent, but huge, gaping holes at the quarterback position. Imagine how much one of these teams -- or any number of other interested teams -- would give up in a trade to get Brees, given a quarterback market so dire that even guys like Josh McCown are subject to free-agent bidding wars.

A Brees trade would add a significant haul of high draft picks that could be used to rebuild the New Orleans roster. However, it would need to be part of a complete, all-in strategy. Of course, general manager Mickey Loomis and head coach Sean Payton would be insane to agree to a tanking strategy without long contract extensions that ensured that they would either get to work their way through the rebuild or at least get paid handsomely for trying it.

And once they took a huge cap charge for dealing Brees, and resigned themselves to finishing near the bottom of the league for a couple of years, the Saints would need to do everything in their power to load as much dead money on their 2015 and 2016 salary caps as possible. The goal would be to emerge in 2017 or 2018 with a ton of young talent -- including a quarterback, though probably one who is still playing in college in 2015 -- and a boatload of salary-cap space.

Why they should do it
Salary-cap problems are going to force the Saints to trim starters off of a roster that is already mediocre. They can add young talent through the draft, but most of those players won't be ready to step into starting roles immediately.

The Saints' defense was horrific last year, finishing 31st in the NFL according to Football Outsiders DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) ratings (explained here). This is a team that needs to be carried by its offense, and that offense is getting really old.

Last year, the Saints' most common offensive starters (including the No. 3 receiver, basically a starter in the modern NFL) had a median age of 30.5. The mean was a bit lower, but only because of young receivers Kenny Stills (22) and Brandin Cooks (21). Seven of the Saints' top 12 offensive players were 30 or older. Very few players on the Saints' offense were actually in the prime of their careers, and their once-strong tandem of guards, Jahri Evans and Ben Grubbs, deteriorated significantly.

Despite this age, the Saints had the NFL's No. 8 offense according to DVOA. Older offenses are often good offenses, but that's a case of the survivor effect. The only players starting in their 30s are usually players good enough to still start in their 30s; the only older offenses that end a year intact are the ones where the older players don't suffer major injuries that would force a team to replace them with inferior younger second-stringers.

The problem is what happens as those good, older offenses continue to age in subsequent seasons. From 2000-13, there were 24 teams where the most common starters had a median age of 30 or more. The following season, those teams dropped in DVOA by an average of -4.7 percent. Some of those teams struggled because of older players in decline; others struggled because the older players had to be cut to get under the salary cap. Either way, an offense as old as the 2014 Saints rarely stays good for much longer.

That average drop would be enough to take the Saints out of the ranks of the league's top-10 offenses ... and if most of the salary-cap cuts come on the offensive side of the ball, it's more likely the Saints' decline would be on the larger side. Combine an average offense with the defense the Saints put on the field last year, and you might have the worst team in the league.

Of course, it's possible there will be no decline. The Saints could be as good on offense as they were a year ago, and perhaps the defense could rebound a bit. With no strong teams in the NFC South, they certainly could slip into the playoffs at 9-7 or 10-6. At that point, you never know what might happen. If any team is going to go on an unexpected playoff run, it's going to be a team with a Hall of Famer at quarterback.

But is that really what the Saints are trying to build: a team that hopes to back into the playoffs at 9-7 and then have all the breaks go its way against Seattle, Green Bay, and whatever other teams build 12-win juggernauts in 2015? That's not a particularly enticing best-case scenario.

Trade Brees, and massively rebuild the roster, and the Saints can concentrate on building a team that resembles those championship contenders, not a team that's built to hope for the tiny sliver of probability that it can beat them in the postseason.

Why they won't do it
There are three strong arguments against the Saints trading Brees and setting their course directly for Tank City (Mayor: Sam Hinkie).

First, even those who feel a Brees trade makes long-term sense must agree that the whole idea is totally unrealistic because the NFL is such a "what have you done for me lately?" league. It's hard to imagine Loomis and Payton have enough job security that they could make the kind of moves that would turn this franchise into an "Aints"-style laughingstock again, even temporarily.


Second, we have to ask ourselves if the Saints truly are doomed to another year of mediocrity, even with their aging roster and impending salary-cap cuts. The Saints went into the 2014 season as a serious contender after finishing 11-5 the year before. The offense is probably going to be fine. Those young wide receivers are just going to get better, and while salary considerations forced the Saints to cut Pierre Thomas and probably not re-sign Mark Ingram, running back is a replaceable commodity in the modern NFL. While many observers feel that Brees has begun to decline, there's evidence that he's still got plenty in the tank. Brees' 2014 QBR of 71.6 was actually the third-highest of his career, and he ranked seventh among quarterbacks in both QBR and DVOA.

The Saints collapsed in 2014 because their defense collapsed. But defense is less consistent than offense from year to year, which means the Saints defense could just as easily rebound to an average level in 2014. In 2013, with mostly the same players, the Saints ranked 10th in the NFL in defensive DVOA. Imagine a Saints offense in which Cooks and Stills improve significantly with experience, and combine that with a league-average defense. You may not have a team ready for the No. 1 seed in the NFC, but you would have a reasonable Super Bowl contender.

Third, the differences between professional basketball and professional football make tanking a much less feasible strategy in the NFL.

Teams in all sports go through rebuilding periods, but they rarely completely decimate their rosters the way we see in the NBA. Scouting for the next superstars seems to be more accurate in the NBA, and the players who are considered to be top prospects tend to develop into the best players at a higher rate than in other sports. And in basketball, one great player has a far greater impact on the game than in any other professional sport. A hitter can only bat one out of nine times in baseball. A pitching ace needs rest between starts. A hockey forward only plays on one line, and a goalie only plays defense. In the NFL, even a star quarterback can't block for himself, catch his own passes, or play defense and special teams.

Combine those two facts, and those top NBA picks have phenomenal value, especially in a year in which an acknowledged superstar prospect like LeBron James or Shaquille O'Neal is available. In the NFL, on the other hand, one top pick rarely turns around his team. The only player with enough impact to be worth tanking for would be a superstar quarterback, and most of the quarterbacks taken near the top of the draft don't even actually develop into top-level players because scouting and player development at the position can be so scattershot. How often does a player like Andrew Luck really come along, a player considered to be a no-risk, guaranteed quarterback superstar?

(Actually, the answer is probably "once every 14-15 years." Luck in 2012, Peyton Manning in 1998, John Elway in 1983. Maybe Carson Palmer was considered at this level before his knee injury, but seemingly guaranteed superstars are very rare at the quarterback position.)

So the biggest problem with a tanking strategy is that the Saints would have to give up the most prized commodity in the NFL -- a top-level quarterback -- with no guarantee whatsoever that they could come out on the other side of the process with another top-level quarterback to lead their team. The idea might make more sense if 2016 were poised to be filled with quarterback talent, but the passers available one year from now come with plenty of question marks. It's one thing to cut a Hall of Fame quarterback when you know you can draft Andrew Luck. It's another to trade a Hall of Fame quarterback in the hopes that you position yourself to draft Cardale Jones and his three college starts.

The Saints shouldn't have very high hopes for this year. It will take a lot of things breaking their way for them to be playing deep into 2016. But tanking would come with no guarantees, either. There's a good chance that trading Brees to the Texans would put the Saints on the path towards being a young, talented team that can't get above 8-8 because there's no quarterback -- in other words, the Houston Texans.

If Mac somehow pulls off a trade and gets Bree's here along with Revis and Marshall this may be the best FA I have every witnessed. The tide may be turning for Jets fans, finally after years of shit we may be relevant again.

If Mac pulled this off he'd be in the Jets Ring of Honor by October. 

I'll burn fucking cars outside. I will burn motherfucking cars