TOP TALENT
From Tampa Bay’s Winston to New Orleans’ Brees, the NFC South is loaded with top-notch passers
He’s surrounded in the division by two most valuable players and a Super Bowl winner, but Jameis Winston has more than held his own.
The Tampa Bay quarterback passed for 4,090 yards last season and became the first player in NFL history with at least 4,000 yards passing in each of his first two seasons. (He and fellow No. 1 pick Andrew Luck are the only players to rack up 8,000 yards in their first two years.)
Winston need only to look around the NFC South if he’s in search of role models. That division is the NFL’s strongest in terms of quarterbacks, with MVPs Matt Ryan (2016) in Atlanta and Cam Newton (2015) in Carolina, and Drew Brees, a likely first-ballot Hall of Famer, in New Orleans.
“He’s a special guy,” Buccaneers coach Dirk Koetter said of Winston. “He sets the tone. I mean, we have a lot of good football players on this team, but from a leadership standpoint, Jameis sets the tone. He’s the leader of our football team.”
Ryan is coming off a phenomenal season in which he guided the Falcons to the Super Bowl.
They built a 28-3 lead over New England midway through the third quarter, before Tom Brady and the Patriots made the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history to win in overtime.
“Any time that we kind of dwell on that is wasted time,” Ryan told reporters before training camp. “We have to focus on trying to become the best football team that this group can be.”
Ryan led the NFL with a stratospheric passer rating of 117.1, the fifth-highest rating for a single season in league history. He set a team passing record with 4,944 yards.
“When you think of consistent excellence this season, you think of Matt Ryan,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank said.
The year before, Carolina’s Newton was the toast of the NFL — except in the Super Bowl against Denver, when he was simply toast.
Newton absorbed multiple crushing hits last season, prompting coach Ron Rivera to look for ways to take some of the weight off his shoulders. The Panthers used the No. 8 pick on Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey, who figures to help both in the backfield and as a receiving target.
Brees, 38, has all sorts of milestones within reach this season. Among them:
The Saint, who has 5,836 completions in his career, needs 290 more to surpass Peyton Manning (6,125) for the secondmost all time. Brees needs 465 completions to surpass Brett Favre (6,300) for the alltime record.
He has led the league in completions five times and can tie Dan Marino (six) for the all-time record.
He needs 35 touchdown passes to join Manning (539) and Favre (508) as the only players with 500 career touchdown passes.
Brees has four seasons with at least 35 touchdown passes and can become the first player in NFL history to pass for at least 35 touchdown passes in five seasons. New England’s Tom Brady and Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers have a chance to do the same this season.
Brees is in the final year of his contract, and has a clause in his deal that prevents the Saints from using the franchise-player designation on him after 2017.
“Honestly, my mind has not been there at all,” he told reporters in July when asked about his contract situation. “It’s really a non-issue. For me, it’s all about this season and how good can we be this season. That’s really all I’m focused on right now.”