Payton expresses confidence in Brees with no talks of retirement

The question lingers.

With only one year left on his current, lucrative contract with the New Orleans Saints, how much longer will Drew Brees play for the Saints?

Appearing on The Rich Eisen Show, Payton was asked if he has ever had the conversation with Brees about when he might retire?

“Honestly, and I’ve been asked that a few times, not once, not even a tingly, dance-around it at all,” Payton said. “I feel like, number one, you don’t see age when you’re around somebody so much. It’s not until their children come running in the stairwells or the meeting rooms that you’re like ‘wow, everyone’s grown up.’ It isn’t something that we discuss.”

Payton and Brees communicate regularly but not about a future without the future Hall-of-Fame quarterback.

“There are a lot of other things that we cover but there’s never that sit-down, hey, let’s spend some time here and talk about the next couple of years,” Payton said. “He’s so competitive and I think like anyone in our work industry or our job, until we don’t feel like we can perform to the level we’ve been used to that I think he looks at it, I’m sure, on a year-to-year basis just like, quite frankly, I do.”

The Saints were an offensive juggernaut for the first 11 games of 2018, averaging 37.1 points per game. Over the final seven games of the season, including a pair of playoff games, that production dropped to 19.7 points per contest.

When asked if he thought Brees dropped off in performance toward the end of last season, Payton was quick to respond.

“I didn’t see that, I didn’t see that at all,” Payton said. “I thought, shoot, he played extremely well down stretch.”

Payton elaborated on the individual games.

“We had a playoff win against Philadelphia that he had a huge part in, a game against the Rams that quite honestly very well could have put us in the Super Bowl and I would have loved to have seen that game but I think that realistically, as we grade the film and look at the players, there hasn’t been that moment where we’ve looked and thought man, back in the day we used to complete those,” Payton said. “I don’t think we’ve seen that and that’s a good thing.”