Filling Drew Brees’ shoes could be a step toward a starting job in the NFL for backup QBs

Taysom Hill has spent a lot of time looking at Drew Brees’ feet.

How Brees moves, the length of his strides and how they’re timed is the key to everything. If Hill can figure out how to walk three steps in Brees’ shoes, and get it all right, whenever he finishes his drops the picture should come together the same way it looks in his playbook. The routes his receivers are running will be break when and where they’re supposed to break, and Hill should have an array of options from which to choose.

Get it wrong and locating open targets becomes a whole lot harder.

“I think everything in the quarterback position is all timing,” Hill said. “I’m constantly trying to get on the same page with my receivers; they’re trying to get on the same page as us. I think the easiest way to do that is just make sure everything lines up with what Drew does. Drew has the timing that we’re going to match everything to how he functions inside this offense.”

Those are the things Hill should be doing, and the timing of ending up here, behind Brees, could be an advantage. Few people in the world have a better work ethic and a grasp of fundamentals than Brees, and if Hill and J.T. Barrett use the veteran’s presence to their advantage in ways others have not, it could be a blessing for their careers.

But Hill will never be an exact facsimile of Brees. He is an entirely different quarterback, and this offense doesn’t play to all of his strengths. This system has spent more than a dozen years building and evolving to fit Brees. It doesn’t take into account the things players like Hill, Barrett and Tom Savage do well that might not work as well for Brees.

And it shouldn’t, but it does create an interesting situation. While the coaching staff might believe a young player has potential and a good set of skills, it has to balance between developing all the things he does well while also making sure he can step in and operate the offense as it is currently designed.

“When that player becomes the starter, you begin to put your system around the strengths and things that he does well,” coach Sean Payton said. “In the meantime, even going into a preseason game, though, there’s a playlist that we’ll have. We know going into this game we’re going to feature a handful of these plays with Drew, but that might tweak a little bit with the next quarterback or the next one.”

For now, the Saints will ask whoever comes in to be able to handle all the things Brees does for the offense. That means starting with being right-foot forward for the snap, which is something both Hill and Barrett are working to settle into after doing it different ways in the past, understanding all the passing concepts, and being able to bark out the multi-syllabic play calls.

That’s not a bad thing. This offense has worked well for a lot of years and has demonstrated brilliance. But it also comes with a lot of responsibilities and nuances that might not suit everyone who walks through the doors.

Payton has said multiple times that he isn’t married to anything and would be willing to change things to suit whoever walks through the door after Brees (and there are no guarantees that person is in the building). So, there is no doubt that the New Orleans offense would change if someone else ever starts a game. And some people have already let their mind wander to what that might look like if Hill ever takes a snap.

“If he did play, maybe you’d see him pull the ball and run, which is not a hard thing to do,” quarterbacks coach Joe Lombardi said. “We’ve done it a few times in practice just to mess with the defense. It’s like, ‘Hey if you see the end crash pull it and take off running.’ That’s like Step 1, and some of these teams are doing the RPOs. When you watch Kansas City and Philly and what those guys do there’s a lot more complexity to it, which if he was ever the starter we might incorporate some of that stuff.”

But for now, the understudies have to master everything the way it is drawn up. It’s not an easy thing to do, which sometimes can be difficult to remember because of how comfortable Brees makes everything look.

“The tough part is this offense was a certain way in ’06, and then when you have the same coaches and the same quarterback it’s grown into this huge playbook that Drew and Pete and Sean yawn at because they’ve been here and just know how it’s been built,” Lombardi said. “When you come in brand new it’s a little bit of a monstrosity.”

Read more about this story at The Advocate.

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