It was with bitter relief that fans of the New Orleans Saints received the news of Drew Brees’ contract extension Friday.
With the team in disarray in the aftermath of the bounty scandal—which dominated headlines this spring and led to unprecedented sanctions and the suspension of several players, coaches and personnel—making sure Brees remained in the black and gold was expected to be the organization’s first priority this offseason.
After weeks at the table, they finally signed the quarterback to a five-year, $100 million extension. But rather than serving as the lone flicker of light in these decidedly dark days for the Saints, it marked the end of one of the more bizarre and frustrating contract negotiations for a high-profile athlete in recent memory.
Aside from the fact that he’s among the league’s best quarterbacks, the argument could easily be made that Brees means more to his team and the community in which he lives than any other player in the NFL.
His arrival in 2006, along with head coach Sean Payton, was the “big bang” moment for a franchise that was among the longest-running jokes in sports. In the 39 years before Brees showed up in devastated post-Katrina New Orleans, the team had mustered exactly one playoff victory, and appeared to be consigned indefinitely to that excruciating purgatory of numbing disappointment and panicked annual renovation. In his first season with the Saints they made it to the NFC championship game. In his fourth they won the Super Bowl.
Brees had just wrapped up a white-hot monster of a season in which he set league records in passing yards, completions and completion percentage. He was the leader of the most dynamic offense in NFL history, a career-maker for any journeyman receiver or eccentric halfback castaway lucky enough to find a home within his attack. Most importantly, he actually wanted to re-sign with New Orleans in the midst of all the uncertainty about the team’s future.
That the organization would balk at such tremendous fortune was unfathomable, so a stalemate was probably the last thing Brees expected when the time came to re-sign with New Orleans.
Yet they did balk, and when it was all over they signed him to a record contract anyway, $60 million of which is guaranteed, including a signing bonus of $37 million that will score Brees an obscene first-year payout of $40 million. It’s almost surely more than the Saints would have had to come up with if they had simply taken care of the matter right away, and frankly, it’s a fair deal.
In the end, the organization hesitated on the only easy decision they’ll have for months, and Brees was compensated accordingly. However outrageous or inflated the final figures may seem, the fact is that the New Orleans Saints spent more than three decades in the wilderness searching in vain for an answer to their agonizingly consistent futility. They finally got one, and he took them from laughingstocks to Super Bowl champs in four years flat. When a player like that comes in looking for a raise, you pay him.