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In 2009, the TV show “Sports Science,” wanted to gauge Drew Brees’ renowned accuracy for one of its episodes. So the show’s producers had him throw footballs at an archery target 20 yards away and compare his strike rate to Olympic archers.

With the cameras rolling, Brees put on a show. He didn’t just hit the target. He peppered it. Over and over. Pass after pass.

Brees hit the 4.8-inch bullseye 10 out of 10 times, an astonishing display of bio-mechanic wizardry that amazed the producers.

Brees’ consistent fundamentals were the secret to his accuracy. The show’s scientists determined that he threw each of his passes with the same 6-degree launch angle, 600-revolutions-per-minute spin rate and 52 miles-per-hour launch speed.

The Olympic archers paled in comparison.

Other quarterbacks won more Super Bowls than Brees. Some were more prolific deep throwers. Others were more dangerous runners and scramblers.

But when it came to the simple art of throwing a catchable, accurate, on-time pass, there’s never been anyone better than Brees.

“What Drew did, he made it look easy, but it’s not — the window is that big and he hits it,” said Tom House, Brees’ long-time performance coach and throwing specialist. “Drew would have a spectacular play or two, but he was not a spectacular quarterback. He was just the best fucker who has ever thrown a football.”

House is biased, of course. But there is little argument to his bold proclamation.

When Brees entered the league in 2001, a 60 percent completion rate was considered the gold standard. By the time Brees retired in 2021, he had almost single-handedly raised the bar to 70 percent. Brees led the league in completion percentage six times and recorded the three highest completion rates for a season in league annals. His 67.7 career completion percentage remains the highest in NFL history among players who played five or more seasons. There have been 17 seasons in which an NFL quarterback completed 70 percent of his passes or better. Brees owns seven of them.

“You could put every quarterback in the league on the same field and tell them to throw all of the same routes, and you’re just going to notice something different about the way Drew places the football, when and where,” said former NFL quarterback Luke McCown, who served as Brees’ backup for three seasons from 2013 to 2015. “It’s just different. The hand of God reached down and touched Drew and said, ‘You’re going to be the most accurate guy to ever throw a football.’”

Saints coaches attributed Brees’ historic accuracy to his unusually large hands and flawless mechanics. His hand width of 10.25 inches ranked among the top 11 percent of quarterbacks at the NFL Scouting Combine, while his 6-foot height ranked among the bottom 8 percent. Because of his large grip, Brees could control the ball and deliver it with maximum rotation. It’s one of the reasons he excelled in the windy, cold conditions of West Lafayette, Ind., as a college star at Purdue University.

“I’ve always felt that accuracy is (about) trust and anticipation,” Brees said. “You have to trust the guys that you’re throwing it to, and you have to anticipate where they’re going to be before they’re there. … I don’t care how well everyone’s covered. There’s a place where I can get a completion. There’s a place where I can throw the ball, where my guy can get it and nobody else can. And it’s my job to figure out how to do that.”

Brees was an accurate quarterback in high school, college and early in his pro career with the San Diego Chargers. But he took it to a different level under the tutelage of House, a former Major League Baseball pitcher and pitching coach.

After his second season as a starter for the Chargers, Brees’ career was going nowhere. He won only 10 of his first 28 games as a starter and threw more interceptions (31) than touchdowns (28). He knew he needed to overhaul his entire life if he wanted to reach his potential. In the 2004 offseason, he changed his diet, his strength training, his approach and his attitude. He worked with a performance specialist on conditioning and balance work and consulted with House about throwing mechanics as part of a broad-based overhaul. That season, Brees led the Chargers to a 12-4 record and a division title, while earning the first Pro Bowl berth of his career.

“He realized he had more in the tank and went out and found a way to get more out of his gene pool,” House said.

When Brees arrived in New Orleans as a free agent two years later, he brought his renowned preparation regimen with him and continued to perfect it. He knew he needed to maximize everything within his control — conditioning, nutrition, game prep, mental stamina, to compensate for what he couldn’t control — his lack of prototype height, speed and strength. To that end, he developed a strict daily regimen — one for the season and one for the offseason. And from day one, he committed himself to always being the first and last player in the building.

In New Orleans, Brees joined forces with Saints coach Sean Payton to form one of the most successful quarterback-head coach tandems in NFL history. In Payton, Brees found the perfect aggressive, play-calling yin to his cerebral, calculated passing yang. The Saints blitzed opposing defenses with a dizzying array of formations, receiver splits and personnel groupings. The league had never seen anything like the complexity of the attack. And each offseason, Payton and Brees went into the X’s and O’s lab and added to the system.

With Brees calling the signals and Payton calling the plays, the Saints offense took off. During their tenure in New Orleans, the Saints gained more yards (95,655) than any offense during any other 15-year period in NFL history. From 2006 to 2020, the Saints led the league in scoring or total offense eight times and never ranked lower than 12th in either category.

During that span, the tandem brought unprecedented stability and success to the once-moribund Saints organization. In the four decades before Brees and Payton arrived in New Orleans, the Saints managed to win just 40.3 percent of their games, two division titles and one playoff game. In the Payton-Brees era, the Saints went 150-88 (.630), won six division titles and went 9-8 in the playoffs.

The Brees-led, high-flying offense transformed the Saints from a perennial also-ran into one of the most popular, high-profile teams in the league. Every home game at the Superdome has been sold out since 2006, and the city of New Orleans annually tops all U.S. markets in television ratings for Saints and NFL games, according to Nielsen Company and the NFL.

“He’s clearly the best quarterback I’ve been around,” said Mark Brunell, who played behind Brett Favre in Green Bay to start his career. “He did everything very, very well. It wasn’t just one aspect of being a quarterback. He was good at everything: the locker room, off-the-field, his study habits, his work ethic, his family, the media. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Over time, Brees transformed himself into the Greg Maddux of NFL quarterbacks, a passing surgeon who beat opponents not with his fastball but by repeatedly painting the black with pinpoint passes. The back-shoulder throw became a staple of modern passing offenses because of Brees’ almost telepathic connection with go-to receivers like Marques Colston, Michael Thomas and tight end Jimmy Graham.

“Drew was the first guy that meticulously took you apart with how he played the position and made you bleed out by a thousand cuts,” former NFL quarterback Trent Dilfer said. “It was about being a surgeon, not a butcher.”

Statistically speaking, Brees is in a class almost to himself. He retired with more passing yards (80,358) and completions (7,142) than any quarterback in NFL history and was the fastest quarterback ever to reach the 50,000-, 60,000-, and 70,000-yard thresholds. He set records for the most consecutive games with a touchdown pass and the highest completion percentage in a game by connecting on 29 of 30 passes in a 2019 game against the Indianapolis Colts.

Brees is widely considered the best player to never win the NFL’s Most Valuable Player Award, having finished second four times. He won nearly every other major individual honor in his distinguished career: 13 Pro Bowl invitations, two NFL Offensive Player of the Year awards and the Super Bowl XLIV MVP award. He also was incredibly durable. He missed just 10 games because of injury during his 20-year NFL career.

“Over the years, his durability and availability were quite amazing,” Payton said. “I think he is as courageous and tough a player as I have ever been around. Not only physically but mentally. There is a grind mentally, a physical wear and tear each week of getting ready to play at that level and the level he expects himself to play at. So, nothing that he ever did surprised me, because you’ve just seen it time and time again. And he’s (not only) one of the best players of all time, but one of the best teammates and one of the best guys to be around and coach.”

For all his records and success, Brees only won one Super Bowl during his 15-year tenure. Part of that was due to bad luck (NOLA No-Call, anyone?). Mostly, though, it was because of leaky defenses. Brees drove his team to leads in the final 2 minutes of playoff games in 2011, 2017 and 2018 only to see the defense fail to preserve the leads each time. In the 2010 and 2011 playoffs, Brees led the Saints to scoring outputs of 36 and 32 points against the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers, and neither was good enough to produce a win.

In a way, Brees’ partnership with Payton might have hurt his status among his peers. Because of Payton’s play-calling aptitude, Brees often was labeled a “system quarterback,” a tag that hounded him throughout his playing career, from Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, to Purdue to the NFL.

Optics were part of the problem. Brees executed so efficiently, he made the job of playing quarterback look easy. His greatness was more nuanced than that of big-armed peers like Favre, Dan Marino or Patrick Mahomes. To fully appreciate Brees’ greatness required time and a sophisticated football mind. It also required an appreciation for intangible traits like work ethic, leadership and attention to detail.

“When you watch Aaron Rodgers run around the backfield for 25 seconds and throw a 70-yard pass across his body on the money for a touchdown, there’s a wow factor that is easy for the casual fan to appreciate,” former Saints right tackle Zach Strief said. “Drew throws 35 passes in a game, and all 35 of them are within two feet of where they were intended to be. You will walk away from that game going, ‘Man, that guy is efficient.’ But you don’t necessarily walk away going, ‘That guy is a freak of nature.’ Now, in reality, he is absolutely a freak of nature. But the flash is not there for him.”

Athletically, Brees was not Lamar Jackson. He might have lacked elite straight-line speed, but the rest of his athletic skills were way above average, even by NFL standards.

One of the most enduring memories of the Saints’ 2009 Super Bowl season was Brees, in helmet and full pads, using his 32-inch vertical leap to dunk the ball over the goal post while celebrating a touchdown he scored on a quarterback sneak in a comeback win against the Miami Dolphins in Week 6.

“He was a rare athlete,” Payton said. “When you look at his foot agility, his release, his accuracy and the fact he has hands as big as mitts, he’s got a skill set that is perfect for the position.”

Few quarterbacks were more adept at maneuvering in the chaotic phone booth of an NFL passing pocket. His extraordinary footwork and pocket presence were big reasons why the Saints annually ranked among the least-sacked teams in the league.

The Saints incorporated Brees’ athletic skills into their offense. Bootlegs and rollouts, which took advantage of his mobility and uncanny accuracy as a passer on the run, were a staple of the system.

“There’s a lot of things to playing quarterback that are not necessarily about being fast or strong,” former Saints quarterback coach Joe Lombardi said. “He had an awareness that was uncanny. He had a sixth sense.”

Brees’ sixth sense was on full display in a 2008 game against the San Diego Chargers at Wembley Stadium in London, England. In the fourth quarter, Brees completed a clutch 15-yard pass to tight end Billy Miller to convert a third-and-5 and help the Saints hold off a late rally by the Chargers. On the surface, there was nothing particularly spectacular about the pass — until the coaches watched the video from the end zone and were able to see it from Brees’ perspective.

From behind, the field was a maze of crisscrossing chaos, with four Saints receivers running crossing routes at various depths, creating a scissors action for the Chargers secondary. Miller, aligned to the left side of the formation, ran a 12-yard in cut to the right behind the underneath receivers. As Brees reached the top of his three-step drop and climbed the pocket to avoid the pass rush, four Chargers defenders converged in man-to-man coverage downfield, stacked one by one between the hashmarks, right where Miller’s route was taking him.

“It should have looked like a stop sign to the quarterback,” Lombardi said. “It’s just a cluster of defenders.”

But as Brees cocked his right arm and fired downfield, something magical happened: The Chargers defense parted, each defender vacating the middle of the field to follow his man in coverage. Brees’ pass zipped into the void, right into the waiting arms of a cutting Miller at the 30-yard line.

In the film room, the Saints coaches were dumbfounded.

“Who throws that ball?!” longtime Saints offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael asked incredulously while rewinding the video of the play. “There’s no way you throw that ball.”

Few quarterbacks would have the audacity to even attempt such a pass, much less complete it. The throw never made the “SportsCenter” highlight reel or went viral on the internet. But it remains the stuff of legend around Saints headquarters. The team’s offensive coaching staff regularly shows video of the play to new quarterbacks that enter the program. In their minds, it is the quintessential Brees completion, a shining example of his otherworldly anticipation, awareness and accuracy.

“People can say and think whatever they want,” Strief said. “Put that guy (Brees) in any system in the NFL, and he was going to excel. To claim that (Brees) is a product of the system because we threw the ball a lot and he got a lot of yards is preposterous. He was the system. The stuff that we ran was the same stuff that other teams ran. We were not running magical plays. We had a quarterback that on the last step of his drop already knew where the ball needed to go and when, and could put it in a window twice the size of a football. That is the system.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: Harry How / Getty Images)