Drew Brees’s transcendent pro football career will be defined by numbers, so many numbers, because the digits he collected are too staggering to ignore: 80,358 passing yards, 571 touchdown throws, 67.7% completion rate, 20 seasons spent dissecting NFL defenses as the premier surgical QB, not just of an era but of all time. He’ll be tagged, too, for winning only one Super Bowl, as if historically great quarterbacks can just snap fingers and collect rings.
I’ll remember Brees, though, not just for the records he collected with an assassin’s ruthlessness, but also for how damn grounded he was in the most abnormal of ecosystems, the alternate universe of NFL stardom.