Is Drew Brees getting old?
While the Saints won their highly anticipated week 1 match against the Bucs, the Future HOF had less than a stellar performance with only 160 yards on 30 attempts (a mere 5.3 yards per attempt, and a- 60% completion percentage). Looking for reasons to be concerned? Take a look at Brees’s efficiency. Using NFL Next Gen stats Completion Percentage above Expectation metric, Brees had an awful game with almost 9% below the expect completion percentage (-8.8%).
Is this another sign of decline as Brees enters deeper into his 40’s?
I plotted the distribution of Brees’ xCOMP (+/-) by weeks (the data only goes back as 2016). One relevant finding in this early stage of the season is that over these 4 years of data, Brees always started strong with an average xCOMP (+/-) of 10.6%.
One more concerning data point – his week1 expected completion percentage was 68.8%, relatively higher than his mean (63.4%) over 2016-2019. This suggests that the quality of passing options were there for the Saints QB, but he was unable to take advantage of these opportunities.
It’s only 1 week, and following a virtual offseason dealing with COVID, so maybe that’s an overreaction. Tonight’s performance will go a long way to tell us if we really should be worried – another look at the figure shows that it is rare for Brees to have two consecutive inefficient games (although his week 2 performances were usually on the less efficient side). If he ends up with another middling game, we may actually begin contemplating that age has finally caught up with the future HOF QB.
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