Drew Brees is in a league of his own statistically. He has led the NFL in passing yards three years in a row and seven times as a Saint (no other player in history has hit that mark more than five times). He has topped 5,000 yards five times — all other quarterbacks in history have combined for only four such seasons. Brees’s New Orleans offenses have finished in the top 10 in scoring in six straight years, and his nine consecutive seasons of 30 or more TD passes are nearly twice as many as the next closest QBs (Brett Favre 1994-98 and Peyton Manning 2009-14). Brees’s passing résumé would force the office printer to run out of paper.
But there is one reasonably important statistic that Brees struggles in: winning football games. The Saints last had a winning season in 2013, finishing 7-9 for three straight years. And in the 16-game era, no quarterback has started every game and missed the playoffs more often than Brees, who has done this seven times. Even some Saints fans are asking whether Brees is merely a compiler of gaudy passing numbers who can’t deliver in the clutch.
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.14 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.15
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 not Brees’s fault
The difference in win total for quarterbacks if their actual defense was replaced by a league-average defense in each game, 2014-16.
| WINS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QUARTERBACK | AVG. OPP. PTS/GAME | EXPECTED | ACTUAL | DIFF. |
| Drew Brees | 28.2 | 31 | 21 | +10 |
| Jay Cutler | 26.1 | 11 | 12 | -1 |
| Derek Carr | 25.8 | 23 | 22 | +1 |
| Blake Bortles | 25.4 | 14 | 11 | +3 |
| Philip Rivers | 24.4 | 22 | 18 | +4 |
| Matt Ryan | 24.3 | 29 | 25 | +4 |
| Andrew Luck | 24.2 | 28 | 21 | +7 |
| Eli Manning | 23.5 | 25 | 23 | +2 |
| Cam Newton | 23.0 | 27 | 26 | +1 |
| Aaron Rodgers | 22.1 | 35 | 32 | +3 |
| Matthew Stafford | 21.7 | 19 | 27 | -8 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | 21.0 | 30 | 28 | +2 |
| Carson Palmer | 20.7 | 26 | 25 | +1 |
| Joe Flacco | 20.3 | 23 | 21 | +2 |
| Andy Dalton | 19.7 | 25 | 26 | -1 |
| Alex Smith | 18.8 | 27 | 30 | -3 |
| Tom Brady | 18.6 | 33 | 35 | -2 |
| Russell Wilson | 17.1 | 30 | 32 | -2 |
The Saints offense does occasionally sputter, and for those games, the team’s chances of winning are solely reliant on the defense — in other words, virtually hopeless. In games when the Saints scored less than the league average, they went 2-14. Brady’s Patriots went 5-6 when they failed to best the league average.
The Saints head into their season opener in Minnesota tonight determined to finally turn around their defense. Head coach Sean Payton said he’s “optimistic” about the unit. Players are even hoping a preseason stretch of eight consecutive quarters without allowing a touchdown will prove meaningful now that the games actually count.
The Saints need a defensive awakening to happen soon. Although Brees plays as though he’s ageless, he’ll turn 39 in January. He doesn’t even need his defense to be good for the team to be successful. The Saints have finished 20th or better in points allowed just five times in his 11 seasons in New Orleans, and Brees has led his team to the playoffs in each of these seasons — averaging 12 wins. Alas, those are his only winning seasons for Payton and his rotating cast of defensive coordinators.
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