Long before the confetti fell in Miami after Super Bowl XLIV. Long before the NFL passing records, the MVP chants inside the Superdome, or this weekend’s gold jacket in Canton, there was a sweltering July morning at Millsaps College in Jackson.
The grass was still wet from overnight humidity. The Mississippi sun hadn’t even reached its full fury, yet sweat was already dripping from helmets before stretching drills were finished. Standing along the rope line with a notebook in hand, you couldn’t help but notice the quarterback wearing No. 9.
He didn’t look like a future Hall of Famer. He looked like a gamble.
That’s what makes this weekend’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame so fitting to reflect upon. While history remembers Drew Brees as the quarterback who resurrected the New Orleans Saints, the truth is that his Saints story didn’t begin inside the Superdome.
It began on a practice field at Millsaps College in Jackson. And almost nobody knew what they were watching.
The summer of 2006 felt unlike any NFL training camp before it. New Orleans was still healing from Hurricane Katrina, less than a year removed. The Saints were still football nomads. Sean Payton had just been hired for his first head coaching job. Reggie Bush had arrived carrying Heisman Trophy expectations. Deuce McAllister was trying to come back from a torn ACL.
The franchise itself was trying to convince people it still belonged in New Orleans.
And then there was Drew Brees.
The Saints had signed him in March after Miami famously failed him on a physical because of the devastating shoulder injury suffered in San Diego. His throwing shoulder had been reconstructed. Doctors questioned whether he’d ever throw with the same velocity again. Even in Jackson, those doubts lingered.
You could see it. Early in camp, Brees’ throws occasionally fluttered. Some lacked their familiar zip. After practices, his right shoulder was routinely covered in ice. Reporters asked about it almost daily because everyone wondered the same thing:
Would his arm ever come back?
The conditions only added to the uncertainty. Mississippi summers don’t care about reputations. The Saints practiced through relentless heat that seemed to get worse every afternoon. Two-a-days became tests of survival more than football. Years later, Brees still grimaced recalling those weeks.
“We had 15 straight days of two-a-days in that heat,” he remembered. “It was miserable… I can’t say it was a pleasant memory, but it strengthened us as a team. It brought us together. It was definitely a defining moment for us as a team.”
Veteran tackle Zach Strief would later call that first Millsaps camp “the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.”
Receiver Marques Colston laughed years later, describing it as “the closest thing to hell on Earth.”
But nearly every player who survived it reached the same conclusion: It forged the identity of the post-Katrina rebirth of the New Orleans Saints.
The Superdome remained under renovation after Katrina, forcing the Saints to spend the entire preseason away from its home stadium. Training camp relocated to Millsaps, and every exhibition game came somewhere else.
The preseason opened with road trips to Tennessee and Kansas City. Their “home” preseason games weren’t played in New Orleans at all. One was moved to Shreveport against Dallas. The other was played across the street from Millsaps at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, home of the Jackson State Tigers against Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts..
For nearly a month, Mississippi became the Saints’ football home. What’s remarkable now is how little confidence surrounded that team. The Saints finished the preseason 0-4. Nationally, few expected much. And even inside the locker room, uncertainty remained.
Former Saints star Deuce McAllister later admitted that no one truly knew if Brees’ shoulder would hold up.
“He just didn’t have the strength yet in that shoulder,” McAllister recalled. “Honestly, none of us knew if he would get it back or not.”
Once the regular season began everything changed. Only weeks after leaving Jackson, Brees led the Saints back into the Superdome for the emotional Monday night reopening against Atlanta. Steve Gleason blocked the punt. The city erupted. The Saints won. The rest became one of the greatest rebuilding stories professional sports has ever seen.
The Saints went from 3-13 to 10-6. The Saints reached the NFC Championship Game. Brees finished with more than 4,400 passing yards.The partnership between Sean Payton and Drew Brees had officially arrived. And three years later the 2009 NFL concluded with Drew Brees holding up the Vince Lombardi Trophy in Miami after the Saints won Super Bowl XLIV.
Now, twenty years later, Brees will take his rightful place in Canton this Saturday. Sean Payton, the first year coach who took that same leap of faith in 2006, will introduce him during his Hall of Fame induction ceremony, a fitting reunion for the duo that transformed an entire franchise.
Fans will remember the records. The Super Bowl. The comeback victories and the countless Sundays inside the Superdome. But here in Mississippi, there’s another memory worth holding onto.
Because long before Canton. Drew Brees was simply a quarterback trying to prove his shoulder still worked under the blistering Mississippi sun at Millsaps College.
At the time, it felt like another brutally hot day at training camp.
Twenty years later, we know it was the beginning of something much bigger.
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