It's time for New Orleans to face reality.
The Saints are in a need of a major overhaul if they plans to return to Super Bowl contender status. That overhaul needs to include the general manager, head coach and, potentially, quarterback Drew Brees.
Brees is the greatest player in Saints history, but can the team really afford to commit three years of big salary to a 39-year-old QB in the midst of a rebuild? Would Brees, whose prime years have been wasted by the Saints' front office, even want to return?
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The Saints over the last few years have struggled to build a competent team around Brees. Since their peak from 2009-11, in which they won 37 games and a Super Bowl, the Saints have won more than seven games in a season just once (2013). This year, they might not reach seven wins for the first time since Brees signed with them in 2006.
Brees has masked the fact that the rest of the roster has not been seven win-worthy. That has only made matters worse for the long term in New Orleans.
The signs pointing to roster problems were clear in 2013 and ’14, when the Saints began signing massive player contracts and continuously deferring salary cap charges to future years. They found themselves having problems with their salary cap over and over again. Since 2015, the Saints have carried nearly $100 million in “dead money,” or cap charges for players no longer on the team. That’s $20 million more than any other team and about $55 million more than the league average.
Normally when teams face salary cap hell the way the Saints have, they make a major concession in one season and get their books in order so they can compete in the future. For the Saints, this should have been strongly considered in 2015 and certainly done in 2016, but they have yet to do it.
Instead of taking the pain for a year, the Saints have continued to sign any players they can regardless of fit or impact on the cap, hoping something would stick. Spend as much as possible, tomorrow be damned.
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The closest comparison to these Saints is the pre-Reggie McKenzie Raiders, which was arguably the worst-run organization in the history of sports. The only thing that has kept the Saints from being looked at in the same way is the presence of Brees, who effectively has played the same role Peyton Manning did for the Colts in the late 2000s. Once Manning went down with an injury, the Colts immediately became the worst team in the NFL. These Saints likely would be no different.
Brees last year agreed to, all things considered, a very low one-year, $24.25 million contract. He did not force the Saints to use a $36 million franchise tag that would have given the team no ability to improve around him. In return for doing that, Brees got two concessions from the Saints: the inability to trade him and the inability to use the franchise tag on him in 2018. The Saints have until the day before free agency in 2018 to either work out an extension or allow him to be a free agent.
While the Saints could not help themselves with finding ways to spend on the cap, they also made another non-advisable move with Brees' contract: They added three voidable contract years to defer a whopping $18 million of cap charges to years Brees was not under contract with the team. That means if the Saints fail to extend Brees before the deadline, they take an $18 million cap charge for him in 2018. That number sticks even if Brees re-signs with the team after free agency begins. It’s a bad situation.
Given how poorly the team has been run, the only reason Brees should consider staying is his affection for New Orleans. The team over the last five years has traded away his best weapons and, in return, used the savings to spend on poor free agents — not to mention poor draft picks. The Saints threw away whatever gift Brees gave them this year with the extension.
And because the Saints have mismanaged their salary cap and contracts so badly, this is not exactly an attractive landing spot for an executive. Many new GMs walk into a situation in which they can rip a team apart, create huge amounts of cap space by cutting players, add draft picks and be praised for it. In New Orleans, a new GM immediately would face the decision of either paying a ransom for Brees or letting the face of the franchise walk for nothing but a compensatory draft pick in 2019.
If a new GM opts to go with Brees, there will be little flexibility with the cap for at least one and probably two years. The Saints project to have around $30 million in cap space next year, but that figure doesn't include a new contract for Brees, an extension for safety Kenny Vaccaro or a tender for receiver Willie Snead. A traditional contract for Brees likely would eat up an additional $14 million-$17 million of the cap in 2018 and $25 million in 2019.
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The Saints essentially are back to square one, having to find a way to build a team around a 40-year-old QB by moving around cap numbers and hoping their GM has the magic touch in the draft and with his free agents.
New Orleans is backed into a corner right now, but doing the same things it has been doing will not work. The Saints need radical changes, and those kinds of changes are hard for organizations to make.
But if the Saints ever want to get out of their seven-win rut, they need to make those changes next year, even if it means somebody other than Brees behind center.