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- Was hoping he'd be uber stubborn and miss some camp. Sounds like he called NO's bluff. WHOA is ARodgers gonna get paid.
Saints agreed to terms with QB Drew Brees on a five-year, $100 million contract.

Per ESPN's Chris Mortensen, the deal contains $60 million guaranteed and a whopping $40 million in the first season. Brees is now the NFL's highest paid player, surpassing Calvin Johnson, Peyton Manning, and everyone else. It's also a table setter for Aaron Rodgers, who is currently grossly underpaid through 2014. Brees is 32 years old, but still playing as well as any quarterback in football. He broke Dan Marino's thought-unbreakable passing yardage record in 2011, and reset his own league record for single-season completion rate. The contract averts a potential disaster for the Saints that might have resulted from a training camp holdout. Brees is now under the team's control through his age-37 season. He's a shoo-in top-five fantasy quarterback for 2012.

This was a deal that had to get done. $37 million signing bonus. Reminds me of the deal we gave Vick back in '04. We gave Vick $37 million in signing bonus, but they were split up in 3 installments ($7.5M/$22.5M/$7.0M) rather than one just lump sum.

It's crazy to think a team could afford to pay that amount of money in one year and have it make sense for their cap. But the crazy thing is that this deal actually saves the Saints $6 million in cap space this year, and will save them a little more than that next year when compared to what his franchise tag could have possibly looked like.

It's going to be interesting to see how this affects the Matt Ryan negotiations in the future. It only raises that price tag. Tom Condon is going to lean the Falcons over a barrel, just like he's done with all of his previous deals. Condon's clients always get the better end of the deal when the ink is dry.

Was there any doubt in anyone's mind that this deal would get done?. Im glad it did, so there can be no excuses when we kick their who dats all over both domes this year.

If you think, Ryan is a the biggest crossroads of his career. Coming up on needing a new contract, but its not like he's earned a deal like the top 4 guys. But, we've not facilitated him enough in multiple ways for him to reach his zenith either. Big, big year on the horizon.

He doesn't really need to "earn" a deal in the sense that he needs to achieve at a higher level. As I said in the piece I wrote weeks ago, the fact that there are few prospects that come out that and clearly better than Ryan makes re-signing him a no-brainer.

It's the same thing when Eli got his deal. There were many skeptics of that deal because up until then Eli was far from an elite QB (despite leading the Giants to a Super Bowl the previous year). But the Giants understood that they weren't going to get a better player than Eli Manning at the QB spot in the foreseeable future. Because as long as Eli was QB, they would be in a position to win 8, 9, 10 games every year and never be in a position to draft in the Top 5 or so to be in a position to draft a QB that was better than Eli. Now occasionally a very good QB will fall into the middle/late portion of the 1st round or the 2nd round, but that is a rare occurrence. If you think over the past 10 or so years of the success stories of QBs taken after pick #20 or so: Brees, Rodgers, Romo, Tebow, Dalton? That's 1 every 2 years, and given that every year you're going to have on average around 8-10 QBs taken outside the Top 20. That basically means that in any given draft you have a 5-6% chance of finding one of those guys.

Even if Ryan doesn't become any better a player than he is today, then they still need to give him an extension, because the chances are very low that at any point in the foreseeable future that they will find someone better.