Derek Carr stayed and made sure everyone got an autograph at yesterday’s open practice

St. Widge said

I think the broader point that pressure is bad for QBs is true. But, maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but wasn't the secret to DAs success against Brady that he would not bring a bunch of pressure and instead played coverage?

I do think there are some QBs, especially the great QBs, that welcome blitzing to create pressure because it allowed them to get big plays. Brees was particularly good at it and so was Brady. But, obviously if you can get pressure with your front 4 and then play coverage behind them, it's the best of both worlds because you still have 7 guys in coverage to stop the big plays that you can get when there are holes created by brining additional pass rushers.

In the end, I think you can be a good QB and still have issues against pressure. But, the great QBs are the ones that can deal with pressure and make the defense pay.

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I think the answer is somewhere in the middle - for example, the blocking schemes in the early Brees years focused on keeping the interior clean. Pass rushers off the edge were pretty much allowed to win wide, so long as the tackle sealed the rusher off before he could work his way back to Brees. The drawback was that 3-4 defenses bothered the system greatly, because the inside could by disrupted by a space-swallowing NT who would mask where the fourth rusher was coming from. It’s how a career day gets made for a David Bowens type of guy - he had a 12-year NFL career and the only detail on it is the day he had against the Saints in 2010.

Contrast that to, say, Peyton Manning, who’d short-circuit if he was blitzed too much from pretty much anywhere. Brees had a better natural sense of where to escape to, and he had better mobility than Manning to get out of the way. It’s how NE put the Colts out of the playoffs in 2004, Pittsburgh did it the following year, and most intrinsically for Saints fans, it’s how we got the Tracy Porter pick-six in XLIV.