Brees vs. Rivers: Chargers still made right choice

Source: SD Tribune

Drew Brees now is a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, and while we can try pointing more fingers than a school of squid as to the why of it — the reason he accomplished this as a Saint and not as a Charger — in the end they all aim at one person: Drew Brees.

Nothing personal. When it mattered, when the team thought he had a chance to be The Guy, he wasn’t nearly good enough. There is no other reason — other than Drew Brees.

Passionate fans love to put themselves in the Hawaiian shirts occupied by General Manager A.J. Smith, so let’s play that game. Let’s play Smith — and Marty Schottenheimer, coach at the time — and be totally honest, rational and unemotional about the entire process that led to Brees being the star in New Orleans’ stunning Super Bowl victory over Indianapolis.

It’s so simple, even I get it.

The NFL is a production-based, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately league. Remember that from the start. It’s hard — especially for quarterbacks.

Anyway, in 2001, then-Chargers GM John Butler drafted Brees out of Purdue with his first choice in the second round. Brees played in 16 games in 2002 and was all right — the team went 8-8 — but instead of improving, he regressed. Badly.

In 2003, he started 11 games, benched for five games at midseason in favor of 39-year-old Doug Flutie. San Diego’s record under Brees was 2-9. He passed for 2,108 yards. His completion percentage was 57.6. He threw 11 touchdown passes against 15 interceptions. His passer rating was 67.5. To be kind, he stunk.

As a result, the Chargers were the worst team in football and therefore had the No. 1 pick in a 2004 draft featuring three promising quarterbacks — Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers. What were the Chargers to do, gamble Brees would snap out of it and eventually take them to Super Bowls?

As Smith has told me more than once: “We had to draft a quarterback.” Absolutely. Positively. Brees’ performance — getting beat out by a short 39-year-old? — made it so.

We won’t get into the entire Eli Manning thing here, but Schottenheimer and his staff coached at the Senior Bowl in 2004, and their quarterback was Rivers. Schottenheimer fell in love with the kid out of North Carolina State.

This also was a time when A.J. and Marty actually were communicating, so when the draft came around and Manning cried that he didn’t want to play in San Diego, Rivers eventually became the choice.

No way anyone without a halo could have predicted what happened next.

Schottenheimer may not admit it now; the plan was to start Rivers his rookie year. But Rivers reported late to training camp, death for quarterbacks, and Brees did well enough in August to keep the starting job.

And then, for whatever reason — he’s always been a great competitor, so maybe his getting pushed pushed him — Brees excelled in 2004. The team went 12-4 and made the playoffs, losing the memorable game to the Jets. Brees became a Pro Bowler, throwing 27 touchdowns against seven picks.

Meanwhile, Rivers, who had signed for $40 million-plus, sat. The Chargers put a franchise tag on free agent Brees and he had another fine season in 2005, although his team wasn’t as good, finishing 9-7 and missing the playoffs. But, in the final game of the regular season against Denver (why was he playing?), Brees dove after a fumble, tearing up his throwing shoulder.

Famed orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews obviously did an amazing job on that shoulder, but there was no way the Chargers — who had Rivers in waiting — or any other team (or Brees for that matter) could predict the future.

San Diego offered him $2 million guaranteed — with makable incentives that would take it to $9 million if he played — and only one other team made Brees an offer, New Orleans. The Saints chummed him a one-year guarantee of $9.5 million, with future options if he remained healthy and played.

Did Brees want any part of New Orleans? Some people think he didn’t. But his future was in doubt and he was offered nearly $10 million. He says it was a “calling” now. But he went for the dough.

The huge monetary gamble worked for New Orleans. The Chargers got Rivers, their own Pro Bowl quarterback, out of it, but he hasn’t won a Super Bowl. Now Brees has, and people are screaming that, once again, the Chargers have blown it.

Smith blew it in one regard. After Brees’ Pro Bowl 2004 season, he never was going to be worth more to other teams. Smith knew Rivers was the quarterback of the future. Teams were dying for quarterbacks. Brees should have been traded then.

Instead, he was allowed to walk after the injury, and with the 2006 third-round pick San Diego got in compensation from the Saints, Smith took linebacker Anthony Waters. He’s not here anymore.

If you want to gripe, gripe about that. If the Chargers thought Brees would become what he’s become, they certainly wouldn’t have drafted a quarterback. Common sense.

Those are the facts. Feel free to tweak them. I’m sure some of you will.

Letting go of letting Brees go

By: Tim Sullivan

Drew Brees is the hurt that won’t heal, the second guess that won’t stop, the big arm that got away, Ryan Leaf in reverse.

Just as the grief of Chargers fans was transitioning from anger to, well, more anger, just after one local pastor opened his Sunday sermon by lamenting the Bolts’ playoff loss to “the stupid Jets,” here was Brees sprinkling creole salt on San Diego’s open wound.

In leading the New Orleans Saints to their first Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, the erstwhile Chargers quarterback has brought rapture to the bayou and fresh rancor to the seething fans of his former team. He has revived a debate that is sometimes dormant but never dies — the question of whether the Chargers exercised haste, waste or careful calculation in letting Brees leave.

The simple answer is that it was never a simple question; that General Manager A.J. Smith’s decision was not made in a vacuum, but as the product of converging personnel and financial forces. While many Chargers fans remain miffed that a Pro Bowl quarterback could walk away for comparatively token compensation, it is not altogether clear — even in retrospect — that a better alternative was available.

To review: The Chargers drafted Eli Manning in the first round of the 2004 NFL draft, then turned around and traded him to the New York Giants for a package featuring Philip Rivers. Manning purportedly wanted no part of the Chargers — since Tom Condon represented both Manning and Brees, the agent’s agenda entailed conflicting interests — but the team’s insistence on finding a new quarterback was largely driven by doubts Brees had been unable to dispel.

The Chargers owned the No. 1 overall selection that spring as the reward for a 4-12 finish the preceding fall. Brees’ record as an NFL starter was then 10-17. He had thrown 31 interceptions against 29 touchdown passes. He was unquestionably undersized, allegedly the owner of a substandard arm, not nearly the player he would later become.

“Like any young quarterback, it takes time,” former Chargers coach Marty Schottenheimer said yesterday. “Like with (Mark) Sanchez in New York, people don’t realize how hard it is to get a young quarterback to play the game at the speed it is played. …

“I think the thing about Drew is that he’s a student of the game. He understands the mechanics of throwing the football, and he had great balance. I just think he reached the point where the skill set he had was complemented by (experience). When those two things dovetailed enough times, he had a chance to become a big-time quarterback.”

Because Brees’ breakthrough 2004 season dovetailed with Rivers’ rookie year, the Chargers found themselves with an unexpected surplus of talent at football’s priciest position. Smith plainly preferred Rivers, and arguably had a larger stake in his success because he had inherited Brees, but he saw enough in the Chargers’ 2004 playoff run to apply an $8 million “franchise” tag to Brees for the 2005 season.

Brees had taken a series of extraordinary steps to improve his game before the 2004 season, enlisting the aid of dietitians, exercise experts, personal performance coaches, personality analyses and former baseball pitching coach Tom House. Through this painstaking process, Brees remade himself from the NFL’s 29th-ranked quarterback into a Pro Bowl player.

Still, Smith wasn’t completely sold. His praise of Brees was consistently faint and his negotiating stance conspicuously short-term. While Brees stumped for a multi-year contract, the Chargers showed little interest in locking him up for any length of time. Even that tepid interest evaporated when Denver’s Gerard Warren smashed Brees’ right shoulder in a pileup during the Chargers’ 2005 season finale.

With Brees fresh from surgery on a torn labrum, the Chargers offered their recuperating quarterback an incentive-laden lowball deal, possibly just for appearances. Brees chose instead to sign a contract with New Orleans that included $10 million guaranteed.

“It was never discussed with me that it was going to be done until after the fact,” Schottenheimer said. “I was disappointed in it. From my perspective, we could have had an opportunity to work and develop them (both) over a period of time. But on the other hand, Philip Rivers has turned out to be a pretty good quarterback, too.”

Among the more popular alternative scenarios was one in which the Chargers would have “franchised” Brees a second time as an insurance policy in the event Rivers stumbled, and as a means of exploiting his trade value in the event Rivers succeeded. There might be an argument for that approach, but it’s not a particularly pragmatic argument. Keeping Brees at that point would have entailed paying a post-operative quarterback roughly $9 million to fill what was projected to be a backup role.

That’s like leasing a Lamborghini just in case your Ferrari breaks down.

Conceivably, the Chargers could have kept the battered Brees and traded a healthy Rivers, but that was never a realistic option. Even now, with Brees one win from the Lombardi Trophy, it’s not yet obvious which guy will have the better career. That’s not a slight for either player, either, but a tribute to them both.

What bearing Brees’ injury had on his career path is conjecture, but it likely pushed Smith in the direction he was already leaning. Having provided Rivers a two-year apprenticeship, Chargers management was eager to see the kid play.

“I don’t know what we would have decided with a healthy (Brees),” Smith said at the time. “I don’t know if the value would have changed or how much it would have changed. But (was it) a factor? Absolutely.”

Smith declined an interview request yesterday, but he has often made the point that the Chargers did not allow Brees to walk away “for nothing,” as is widely perceived.

Because the Chargers tend to be spectators in the marketplace for front-line free agents, they ultimately received a third-round 2007 draft choice as compensation for Brees signing with the Saints. That draft choice was spent on Clemson linebacker Anthony Waters, who was credited with three tackles before the Chargers cut him last February.

Feel better? Didn’t think so.