by Jeff Duncan
McCown estimated that Brees and Payton probably add 30 to 35 plays to the playbook throughout a given season. But most alterations involve subtle changes to the core concepts within the Saints’ established menu. New plays have to fit within the scheme of the offense for players to digest and understand them easily.
“A lot of times you have video looks where you can show them, ‘See, take a peek at this,’” Payton said. “And you show them a picture: ‘Picture if we do [that].’ And so we try not to come up with a lot of new inventions. Might be formation, might be personnel grouping, but I think there’s a balance there of things that they know well.”
More new plays are sometimes added when new players are signed to the roster. For example, the Saints incorporated a read-option run package in the offense when Taysom Hill came on board in 2017. When Mark Ingram was drafted in 2011, the Saints started to run more outside zone run plays. These new plays might drop out of the playbook once the player moves on, but they stay in the offense. So the inventory just continues to build.
“Sean looks at it and says, ‘What fits our personnel best?’” Carmichael said. “Is it the power schemes? Is it the zone schemes, and is it inside or outside zone? We’ve always had those kinds of concepts in our offense, but it’s more like what are we making our focus on this year based on our personnel and then we incorporate them into the offense.
“I can remember the night before the [2006] draft we found out we were going to end up with Reggie Bush, and the next day there was 10 new formations on everybody’s desk.”
Where the Saints offense has taken on a life of its own, though, is in pre-snap adjustments they’ve added to counter opposing defenses. The Saints use a series of code words they call tags to communicate these adjustments on each play. Many of the plays also have run-pass options, meaning two plays are actually called in the huddle, giving Brees the option to change the play according to the defensive look he sees at the line of scrimmage.
“The offense has become so complex because the answer isn’t always so easy as, well, check to this run,” Strief said. “Instead, it’s we need to have a mechanism now to bring this receiver down, and what does Drew do to motion him down? He’s going to cover the force, and it’s going to change this scheme over here, so do we have to signal it? Do we have to call it something? Can Drew handle it? Do the other guys even have to even know about it? And then once you have that mechanism, it’s now a tool in the offense and it can be used whenever. All those adjustments and these little solutions that have been found over the years do certain things and they add up.”
As the Saints have incorporated these nuances into the system, the in-huddle play calls have grown lengthier and lengthier over the years.
Just a few examples:
Full Left Twin Y Orbit Q8 Kill Toss 39 Michael
Bunch Right Tare Slash 37 Weak F Kill Q8 Solid Z Speed Smash
Gun Flex Right Stack 394 Dragon Smoke Kill Turbo Sucker Right
The code words indicate different things to the offense.
Full Left Twin Y is the formation, an alignment with two tight ends (the “Ys”) on the left side.
Orbit is a pre-snap motion.
Dragon Smoke designates a route concept by the receivers.
The numbers—39, 37, 394—are pass protections, with the 3 signifying a three-step drop by the quarterback.
In general, the longer the play call, the more information Brees is communicating to the rest of the offensive players.
“[Brees] can call a little bit lengthier play call in the huddle, but it’s letting everybody else know what to do,” Payton said. “It takes some of the pressure off the other guys but puts a little bit on Drew’s plate. That’s why our vocabulary is expanded on in-the-huddle calls.”
Former Saints quarterback Garrett Grayson, the team’s third-round pick in 2015, admitted that he struggled to master the verbose calls and communicate them with authority in the huddle during his first few years in New Orleans.
When Teddy Bridgewater took over the offense after Brees was injured in 2019, the play calls weren’t as long. And they wouldn’t be as involved if Hill took over the offense, either.
“It’s a coaching maxim and it’s probably a good one: Keep it simple,” Lombardi said. “We don’t do that here.”
Over the years, the challenge for the Saints has come in trying to keep the offense at the PhD level for Brees while still making it work for the other players, who don’t have the same mastery of the system. It’s one of the reasons new players, especially rookies, struggle to make an impact early in their Saints careers. The learning process can be formidable and, in some cases, confounding.
“When you’re building the playbook, everything makes sense and there’s a logic to the terminology,” Carmichael said. “These formations are all called this for a reason. Then, all of a sudden, you make a tweak the week you’re playing the 49ers, and we call it ‘49er Right.’ Well, that formation just stays in the playbook, and sometimes it’s a little bit more of a challenge for a new player coming in, saying, ‘That makes sense. All these terms start with [the letter] T if you’re in 13 personnel. Wait, 49er Right? Where did that come from?’ Giant Panther, what’s that?’ Well, they’ve stayed in the playbook because they work. And that could be a challenge for new players.”
The Saints offense has morphed and evolved so much over the years, Lombardi jokingly compares it to the Winchester Mystery House, the infamous California mansion with architectural oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms, and stairs with uneven risers.
“One of the things about an offense that has evolved like ours is there are a lot of hallways that lead to nowhere,” Lombardi said. “We’ve just become so much more complex.”
The danger with becoming so complex is a potential breakdown in efficiency. More offense doesn’t necessarily translate to better, more efficient offense. Information overload can often paralyze players and lead to mental errors. The extra bells and whistles might look great on the whiteboard, but they can prove counterproductive if they cause pass-catchers’ heads to swim in the lineup.
The reason this hasn’t happened in New Orleans is largely because of Brees. In addition to being one of the smartest quarterbacks in the NFL, someone capable of processing the myriad nuances added to the offensive package, he’s also someone who has an almost insatiable desire to learn, who can’t get enough of the process. Former Saints offensive tackle Jon Stinchcomb refers to Brees as “the supercomputer” because of his staggering ability to process information and then transfer it to the playing field.
The analogy Payton uses to describe Brees is that he’s the guy who, when buying a new car, always gets the deluxe model with the bells and whistles on the dashboard. Where he differs from most people is “he actually learns what each button does and then masters how to use it.”
“It’s almost to a fault with him,” Payton said. “He’s going to know the line calls and the assignment of everyone on offense. If you’re not careful, he’s got the filet on the grill at Emeril’s but he’s taking a peek at the banana cream pie. You’re like whoa, whoa, whoa. But we have a lot of volume here because we can put a lot on Drew, and he’s able to handle it.”
The Brees Supercomputer gives the Saints the ability to construct offensive game plans that seem brand-new to their opponent each week but are still easily digestible for their offensive players. The plays stay the same, but the Saints make them look different by tinkering with the alignments or changing the formation. Along with varying their formations and alignments, the Saints also get creative with the routes themselves—both the combinations and the players who run them.
The idea is to keep defenses guessing. And the staff leans heavily on Brees to communicate these nuances to the other 10 offensive players before the snap and get the Saints in and out of the right play at the line of
scrimmage.
“We have a base offense, and then we evolve, and build off of that offense,” Brees said. “We are very game-plan oriented, so each and every week, there are very few calls replicated from the week before, and if they are, it’s new shifts, motions, formations, personnel groups potentially.”
These modifications create a heavy burden for the Saints offensive personnel during game-week preparation. It’s one of the reasons the Saints personnel department places such a heavy emphasis on football IQ and intelligence in their scouting reports on prospective offensive skill-position players.
“We change our formations up quite a bit, just to try to disguise looks, whether it’s a shift or a motion to make it look different even though it’s the same to us,” Carmichael said.
Former Saints quarterback Luke McCown played for four teams in the nine seasons before he joined the Saints in 2013. He said he’s never seen anything like the offensive complexity the Saints employed on weekly basis under Payton and Brees.
“It’s not like they call the same plays every week,” McCown said. “Sean comes up with a whole new game plan every week for that particular defense and those schemes that he’s seeing. And then for the execution to work out the way it does on Drew’s end is remarkable. I played for a bunch of different teams and offenses, and I’d never seen that before. It’s remarkable.”
Strief estimated the Saints add six to eight new tag concepts each season. Multiply that by the 14 years Brees and Payton have been together in New Orleans, and it’s easy to see why the Saints offense is a massive learning challenge for players, especially newcomers to the system.
“It can get complicated very, very quickly, and that is the evolution of the offense, because all of those answers, all of those problems are still in the offense,” Strief said. “[Former Saints receiver] Lance Moore talks all the time about how this offense is so different than anywhere else. And there’s just so much stuff. They’re not in the playbook, but they’re in the offense because those two guys [Brees and Payton] remember that. Once it’s in, it’s in. Those two guys have been building the same offense for now [14] years, and that has made this very complicated for a lot of guys.”
This offensive evolution wasn’t intentional and it certainly didn’t happen overnight. The process is 14 years in development. As Brees grew more familiar with Payton’s scheme during his early years in the system, the playbook gradually expanded. His learning capacity staggered the Saints offensive staff. The more the coaches gave him, the more he ate it up. The staff quickly started to realize Brees was a different animal than anyone they had encountered before. His brain was seemingly incapable of being overloaded. And so they kept adding more to the playbook until they came up with the sprawling amalgamation they have today.
“There’s a lot of people in the NFL that believe less is more, and that’s okay—that works, too,” Campbell said. “But not when you’ve got a quarterback like ours. The candy shop is open with him. More is more with him.”
Dome-ination:
2008 Green Bay Packers
While the New Orleans Saints led the NFL in total offense and advanced to the NFC Championship Game in the first season of the Payton-Brees era, the offense didn’t fully come into its own until Year Three. By 2008, Drew Brees had full command of the offense and Sean Payton had added a fleet of playmakers to the attack: Reggie Bush, Marques Colston, Robert Meachem, Lance Moore, Pierre Thomas, and Jeremy Shockey. And while the 8–8 record didn’t reflect it, the Saints were building into an offensive machine. That year, the Saints led the NFL in total yards (6,571) and scoring (463 points), the first time in franchise history they’d led the league in both categories in the same season. And Brees became just the second quarterback in NFL history to pass for more than 5,000 yards in a season. He fell just 15 yards shy of Dan Marino’s then-NFL record of 5,084 yards and was named the NFL Offensive Player of the Year, the first Saints player to ever win the award.
The first real glimpse of the Payton-Brees juggernaut came on November 24, 2008. In a Monday night game against the Green Bay Packers, the Saints delivered a 51–29 beatdown before a national television audience.
The Packers were coming off a 13–3 season in Mike McCarthy’s third year as head coach. They entered the game on the heels of a 37–3 rout of the Chicago Bears eight days earlier. And they were helpless against the Saints.
After going three-and-out on their opening drive, the Saints didn’t punt again until the final 3:45 of the game. They scored on eight of their next nine drives. Brees completed 20 of 26 passes for 323 yards and four touchdowns. His passer rating of 157.5 established a career best and was the second- highest rating ever recorded against the Packers in their illustrious history.
“They just beat us, can’t make any excuses, what happened here or there, they came out and beat us like we’ve never been beat,” Packers defensive tackle Ryan Pickett said afterward.
Brees lit up a Packers pass defense that was ranked third in the NFL and had returned six interceptions for touchdowns in the previous 10 games.
“We got our [expletive] whupped tonight,” Packers cornerback Charles Woodson said. “Thoroughly. In front of the whole country.”
It was the first major offensive outburst of the Payton-Brees era. The 51 points tied a Saints franchise record and were more than the Packers had allowed in the previous three games combined. In fact, they were the most allowed by the Packers in nearly 22 years. The game also marked the first time a Saints quarterback had ever recorded a passer rating of 150 or higher in a game. If there was a coming-out party for the Payton-Brees Saints offense, this was it.
“We had gotten some pieces to the puzzle that you felt like, ‘Okay, we’re poised to make a run,’” Brees said of the 2008 season. “It was our third-year comfort level in the offense. We had added some difference-makers to the offense. We had the four horsemen [receivers Colston, Henderson, Meachem, and Moore], and we were rolling.”
9. Blitzing the Defense
The volume of the Saints offense gives Brees and Payton myriad options to work their magic on game days. But what has made the Saints attack so unstoppable over the years is its multiplicity and the aggressive philosophy behind it. And that starts with Payton, whose offensive approach is to “blitz the defense” with an array of formations, alignments, and personnel groupings. He also takes advantage of quick counts, no-huddle and hurry-up tactics—anything he can to gain an edge over the enemy. The idea is to apply pressure on the defenders and stress the opposing defensive coordinator as much as possible from play to play.
From a defensive perspective, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with and prepare for everything the Saints throw at opponents. It’s not uncommon to see the Saints line up in 30 formations or personnel groupings before halftime. The Saints have used as many as 60 different formations and personnel groupings in a game before. They used 44 in their game against the Dallas Cowboys in 2019.
“They give you a lot to get ready for,” New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick said before playing the Saints in 2009, a game the Saints would eventually win 38–17. “If we took the other 15 teams we play and put all the formations and personnel groups together, it would probably be about the same as the Saints. It’s that many. Over the course of 70 plays, there are hardly any repeat formations in the game. Sometimes you end up making mistakes, blowing a timeout or something like that, and that’s an issue, too. And the Saints really try to stress you on that, probably as much as any team I can remember. It’s hard.”
The Saints leave no stone unturned in their quest to blitz the defense. During timeouts, they keep their five perimeter players on the sideline so opposing coordinators have less time to match their personnel. They even use a unique verbal system to employ their personnel groups for each play to expedite the process.
The Saints create additional stress and confusion for opposing defenses by breaking the hu
ddle quickly before each play, preferably at or before the 19-second mark on the play clock. They often huddle four yards behind the line of scrimmage, one yard closer than most teams, to save time getting to the line of scrimmage.
“We really harp on the tempo of in and out and up and down and on and off in trying to apply pressure offensively,” Payton said.
And the Saints don’t slow down once they reach the line. Brees uses a variety of pre-snap motions and movements to keep defenses on their heels. And if catches the opponent in the midst of aligning or calling out the play, he’ll audible to a quick count and snap the ball.
“When you shift and move, really that’s your way as an offense of blitzing the defense,” Brees said. “You make them have to adjust quickly, make decisions quickly. At times, defenses will have checks to certain formations or certain looks, whatever it might be, depending on the personnel you have on the field or the formation you’re in. So when you’re able to switch guys up and move them around a lot, all of a sudden it puts the defense in a tough spot where maybe they blow a coverage or a guy pops wide open, and you get a matchup that favors you.”
Further, the ball comes out quickly in the Saints system. Brees’ ability to read defenses and process information allows him to make quick decisions in the pocket. He annually ranks among the NFL leaders in time-to-throw statistics, regularly averaging about 2.5 seconds from the time of the snap until the time he gets rid of the ball.
“Everything they do offensively is at a breakneck pace,” former Seattle Seahawks head coach and longtime NFL assistant coach Jim Mora Jr. said. “The way they get on and off the field in substitution. The way Drew Brees gets into the huddle, calls the play, and gets to the line of scrimmage. The way they shift. The way they go in motion. And it puts tremendous stress on, not only the defensive coordinator to get a call in, but on the defensive personnel to react.”
Before Super Bowl XLIV, then–Indianapolis Colts defensive coordinator Larry Coyer described the Saints as “the masters of hiding personnel groups. That’s where their genius lies. They move them around all the time. It’s problematic because they do it so quickly and they do it every play. You have to weather the storm, really.”
