as far as bridgewater goes, there's reason to believe he's for real. if he was an asset under control, the saints could have gotten a preposterously high value for him. the landscape of the nfl is changing and we are seeing a lot of teams (including both super bowl teams in a copycat league) run direct or modified versions of the west coast offense and that plays strongly into bridgewater's strengths, as we saw last season with the saints. what he put on tape there was a blueprint for every interested party to see how he would look in a competent offense that was built to his strengths. the reason he was even with the saints is because of how appropriate he would look in a brees offense in a scenario exactly like what went down. his ability to mimic brees with the scout team and absorb nuance from him will shape his career moving forward from what were essentially two years of redshirting. i think the original plan was unofficially to groom bridgewater to take the reigns for the saints, but the immortality of drew brees saw otherwise. the new school analytics heavy vibe that this new coaching staff is presenting paired with this signing seems to suggest they're going in the exact opposite direction from cam newton in the sense that they wanted a pinpoint accurate passer in the short game that would utilize his checkdowns and move the ball methodically down the field with short drops and getting the ball out before the line has time to fail. cam was never incredibly accurate in the short game and always seemed to favor his intermediate targets until his shoulder issues and norv turner dictated otherwise. that's how a sub 60% passer suddenly turned into a 68% percent passer in cam's last healthy season, but it robbed the offense of big plays because we didn't have the personnel to do it correctly. bridgewater was consistently under duress with the vikings and it manifests in his sack totals. he was a 22-23 year old quarterback playing in the same backfield as the best runningback of his generation and every defense run blitzed the pure hell out of him. they also used peterson in the redzone a preposterous amount because duh, which suppressed bridgewater's touchdown totals. the numbers don't tell the full story, but the efficiency in his completion percentage under all that blitzing is a little eyebrow raising in a positive way.
the term game manager is no longer a stigma, but more closely representative of what the ask is for a modern quarterback. be a strong decision maker and we will give you more speed than you can comprehend on the field at the same time. find the open one. get the ball to the athletes and let them be athletic. the fact that we have the best dual threat rb in the league is an interesting wrinkle. we restructured the line by adding okung at tackle, which was perhaps our biggest weakness last season. the cost of trai turner is tolerable because of the stylistic changes. this isn't going to be 3 yards and a cloud of dust, punch you in the mouth type of run fixated offense we saw under rivera. expect lots of moving parts, misdirection, 5 yard runs, and 6 yard passes. the narrative may be that this is a lame duck season, but counting out bridgewater would be nuts. everyone you hear talk about him says his teammates would put it on the line for him and that he's a natural leader. if there's any residual stagnation from this past season, he can probably sort it out. as for the defense, we don't talk about the defense. we have to keep them off the field.
