Saints, Drew Brees should be more eager to get contract done

1:02 PM ET

METAIRIE, La. — The timing was ripe for Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints to finally get a contract extension done this week leading up to training camp.

Instead, stubbornness remains undefeated. Brees said the two sides haven’t even resumed negotiations in the past three months.

Obviously they need some sort of artificial deadline to spur action. But this week seemed like the perfect one. Brees, 37, could eliminate the risk of injury heading into the final year of his current deal. The Saints could secure the one guy keeping them in playoff contention — and prevent his future from becoming the subject of those weekly “splash reports” they so despise from the national media.

And everyone could show up in West Virginia all smiles, with positive vibes to help shake off the rust from back-to-back 7-9 seasons.

Then again, I thought they woulda, shoulda gotten this deal done months ago, before the start of free agency, when they coulda reduced Brees’ $30 million salary-cap figure.

Drew Brees, 37, passed for a league-high 4,870 yards last season. Sean Gardner/Getty Images

Now I’ll stress that they had better get it done before the start of the regular season — which Brees has set as his own unofficial deadline. But it has become painfully obvious that this deal won’t come together quickly or easily.

So what makes this contract so much harder than the ones that Andrew Luck and Joe Flacco signed this offseason?

Well, some of it can probably be attributed to three strong-willed people — Brees, his power-agent Tom Condon and Saints general manager Mickey Loomis. And a lot of it can be attributed to Brees’ age and the guaranteed money associated with a deal like this.

It’s easy to say that Brees deserves somewhere between Luck’s $24.6 million per year in new money and …

continue reading in source espn.go.com