Mickey Loomis gets reminders about the passage of time every time he takes his twins out to play for their flag football team. One of their teammates, a little boy named Bowen, has a pretty famous dad, and that pretty famous dad just so happens to be their coach.
Not every kid from New Orleans gets to learn football from Drew Brees.
And as Loomis, the Saints’ general manager for the last two decades, sees it, it’s just one more benefit he gets to have from his 15-year association with the most beloved athlete who’s ever played a professional sport in Louisiana. Of course, it didn’t take all that time for Loomis to know what he had. But just seeing Brees as doting dad and youth-league coach has a way of lending perspective to all that’s happened since 2006.
“Just the way he handles that team and handles the kids is so impressive,” Loomis said early Sunday night. “It reminds me of how much he has grown and how life goes on here. Because when he got here, it was him and Britt, no kids. And now he’s a father who’s coaching his son, and my two kids happen to be on his team. So there are a lot of memories. But my kids know him as their coach, not as the Saints’ quarterback.”
Truth is, really, all Louisianans see him as more than the Saints quarterback, too.
Brees retired Sunday after 20 NFL seasons, 15 of them spent as a Saint. And sitting here now, it’s hard to illustrate properly for all of you the impact he’s made.
It starts, of course, with football, because that’s what put him in the position he’s been in to begin with. And make no mistake, he’s done plenty between the lines, just playing the position of quarterback, to assure himself a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026. We’ll take you through the numbers in a bit, but anyone who’s even casually followed the NFL since 2001 knows those are all there.
From there? Brees’s story can take you in a lot of different directions. He changed assumptions on quarterbacks who live outside of the prototype. He changed assumptions on a woebegone franchise. He changed assumptions on what a certain injury means for a quarterback.
But most of all, as a guy who bucked the odds in so many ways, he gave a region that badly needed it something to wrap its arms around and take pride in, when the odds were stacked against it in the aftermath of an unprecedented natural disaster. Brees is a football player, so it’s not like he could reverse any of what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans.
He simply did what he was capable of—which turned out to be a lot, on the field and off it.
“Look, it’s just hard to imagine any player having a bigger impact on a city and an organization than Drew has had,” Loomis said. “And it wasn’t single-handed. But he had such an impact on our city and our team in a time when we were really desperate for it, after Hurricane Katrina. And the way he and his wife Brittany and his family have embraced New Orleans and Louisiana has just been beyond anything we could’ve imagined 15 years ago.”
Brees never got the second championship he was chasing the last few years. But it’s not hard to argue that what he’s leaving in New Orleans is much more valuable.
