Drew Brees, after much deliberation, will return to New Orleans in 2020, but Brandon Tierney and Tiki Barber disagree about what his return means for the Saints.
“The window is shut,” Tierney said on Tiki & Tierney. “He might owe it to himself to try to get that second championship. Maybe he owed it to the Saints to come back. However you view that, that’s fine. They’re not getting to the Super Bowl. The NFC is too good. The NFC is too potent. He’s not the same guy – and neither is Tom Brady. They’re not.”
“But does he have to be?” Barber countered. “That’s the question. Does he have to be that same guy in order to get the Saints back [to the Super Bowl]?”
“My answer is yes,” Tierney said.
Barber isn’t so sure, in part because the pieces around Brees are elite.
“We saw this three years ago when Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara are this dynamic force out of the backfield,” Barber said. “They were unstoppable. They kind of still have it with Latavius Murray. He’s underrated for as good as he is at times and as powerful as he is as a runner. But you throw in the fact that Michael Thomas is the best receiver in the NFL right now, it’s just ridiculous how good he is. And a lot of that is because of Drew Brees, but also a lot of that is because of Teddy Bridgewater. It doesn’t matter who’s throwing him the ball. Michael Thomas is the man.”
Thomas had an NFL-record 149 receptions for an NFL-best 1,725 yards this past season.
“So you’ve got these offensive pieces around you, these skill-position pieces around you,” Barber said. “You know that, yes, the NFC is tough, but it almost feels like they’re in this on-any-given-Sunday moment. The Rams maybe will get back there, but the 49ers are certainly going to be back at the top of the NFC, you believe. I can’t call who’s going to be out of the NFC East – maybe the Cowboys, maybe the Eagles – but I can’t trust anybody in the East. If you look in the North, the Packers are going to be good again. So there’s three teams that you contend with.”
Tierney believes there are more than that.
“You left a few out,” he said. “By the way, the team you left out is the team that beat the Saints in the playoffs, the Vikings. And Seattle. It’s a longer list. That’s my point.”