Check out big brains on Saints, who drew own Brees conclusion

Next time I have my palm read in New Orleans, I'm not walking to Bourbon Street. I'm tooling down the road to Metairie to check in with the Saints.

You heard me. The New Orleans Saints. They're the guys who looked into the future and saw Drew Brees winning for them. OK, so that's a stretch. But they're the guys who saw Drew Brees playing for them, and look how that's working out.


Does Drew Brees like being a Saint? Well, he leads the NFL in passing yards and his team's a contender ... (US PRESSWIRE)
Brees has the Saints on top of the NFC South, is among the league's top-rated quarterbacks and is in the on-deck circle -- right behind Peyton Manning -- when talk gets around to a league MVP.

Remarkable? Yep. Brees deserves all the credit in the world for helping to turn around a franchise that hit rock bottom last season. But let's hear it for the Saints themselves. Remember, they were the only team willing to invest a small fortune in Brees, believing he could -- and would -- overcome a serious injury to his right shoulder and solidify the game's most important position.

"I don't think we were smarter than everyone else," said Mickey Loomis, New Orleans' executive vice president and general manager. "It was probably more of a gamble."

Maybe. But the key is that the Saints took a chance that no one else would. And they won. They won big. But listen carefully to Loomis. He's not convinced that Brees was the risk others did. In fact, he's convinced he wasn't.

"We talked to a lot of doctors with experience with this particular injury in baseball," said Loomis, "and basically they felt there was no reason he couldn't come back from it. Now, sometimes players don't recover the full velocity with throws for some time, but the people we talked to gave us every indication he could come back from this

http://www.sportsline.com/nfl/story/9805230