Drew Brees turned 47 on Jan. 15. Two days later, Bo Nix broke his ankle in Denver, and within days two of Brees’ oldest coaching allies were on the phone asking whether a Hall of Fame quarterback five seasons into retirement would consider one more game.
That is the story ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Monday night, hours before the Broncos opened their Monday night schedule in Kansas City. Then-offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi and offensive assistant Pete Carmichael, both of whom worked with Brees for years in New Orleans, discussed a comeback with him ahead of last season’s AFC Championship Game against the New England Patriots.
Brees wanted to work out first and see how his body held up. When he tried, his wrist told him no.
Denver went to the conference title game with Jarrett Stidham and lost 10-7 at home. Nobody outside the two assistants and Brees knew there had been another option on the table, and that includes the head coach.
How the call happened
Nix fractured his ankle in Denver’s overtime divisional-round win over the Buffalo Bills on Jan. 17. Lombardi and Carmichael reached Brees early in the week leading into the Patriots game, and Brees agreed to explore it on one condition: He would throw first and let his body decide.
The workout produced discomfort in his wrist, and Brees shut the idea down. In his own words, the attempt would have been one of “the most improbable returns in NFL history.”
The Broncos were not treating it as a novelty. A Denver source told ESPN that signing Brees would have made him “1A or 1B” at the position, with the team prepared to sign him and sort out whether he or Stidham gave them the better chance.
Brees’ own pitch was blunt.
“I know how to win a game like that,” Brees said.
He had the resume to say it. Brees retired after the 2020 season with 80,358 passing yards and 571 touchdown passes across 20 seasons and 287 games, per Pro Football Reference, with 13 Pro Bowls, a Super Bowl MVP and a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction this summer.
The one thing he had not done was take a snap in five years.
Payton was the last to know
The detail that turns a good anecdote into a strange one is who was left out. Lombardi and Carmichael did not tell Sean Payton about their conversations with Brees.
The assistants wanted to find out whether Brees was even willing before bringing it to the head coach who had spent 15 seasons with him in New Orleans.
Payton found out in the offseason. When his assistants first mentioned it, he assumed they were talking about a different near-miss: a December 2021 Monday night game against Miami, when the Saints lost Jameis Winston to a torn ACL, had Taysom Hill and Trevor Siemian on the reserve/COVID-19 list and started rookie Ian Book.
That earlier episode was real, too. New Orleans approached Brees, Josh McCown and Philip Rivers about coming back during that stretch, and Brees chose to stay retired.
The difference in January was the stakes: not a December game but a conference championship, with a roster that had gone 14-3 and earned the AFC’s top seed.
What Denver got instead
Stidham started the AFC Championship Game on Jan. 25 at Empower Field at Mile High and completed 17 of 31 passes for 133 yards with a touchdown and an interception.
He also lost a fumble deep in Denver territory that set up Drake Maye’s touchdown, New England’s only one of the night. The Patriots’ pass rush decided it.
Stidham completed one of 10 throws under pressure for four yards with an interception and was sacked three times, and New England held the Broncos to four first downs over their final eight possessions as the snow came down.
Maye threw for just 86 yards but ran for 65, including the tying touchdown and a late third-down conversion that sealed a trip to Super Bowl LX.
Whether a 47-year-old Brees on a bad wrist would have done better in a 10-7 snow game is unknowable. What the report establishes is that Denver’s staff thought the question was worth asking.
The Rivers precedent
The idea was not as far-fetched in January as it would have been a year earlier. Philip Rivers had already returned from retirement to play quarterback for the Colts down the stretch of last season, which is likely why Schefter framed Brees’ flirtation as the sequel to Rivers’ out-of-nowhere comeback.
Brees’ road after football gave the assistants reason to think he might listen. He went to NBC after retiring, left the door open to playing again in 2022 after departing the network, then took an interim assistant role at Purdue that December.
He had also said previously that he “had some conversations” about a return without specifying what the opportunity was — a line that reads differently now.
Why it resurfaces tonight
The timing of the report is not an accident. The Broncos are in Kansas City for Monday Night Football, and the coordinator who made the call is not on the headset.
Lombardi is no longer Denver’s offensive coordinator, and Davis Webb calls plays in a regular-season game for the first time tonight, opposite a Patrick Mahomes returning from a torn ACL suffered nine months ago to the day.
Payton and Brees, meanwhile, have spent the summer closer than ever. Brees asked Payton to present him at his Hall of Fame enshrinement, and Payton did so on Aug. 8 in Canton.
It is a safe guess that the January phone calls came up somewhere between the video tribute and the bronze bust. What the episode says about the Broncos is more interesting than what it says about Brees.
A staff that had just lost its franchise quarterback on the doorstep of the Super Bowl was willing to consider a 47-year-old who had not played since the Trump-Biden transition, and two experienced coaches were willing to run that idea past the player before running it past their boss.
Denver got to the AFC title game anyway and lost by three. Nine months later, with Nix healthy and a new play-caller on the sideline, the Broncos are trying to get back — and the quarterback they almost called is a Hall of Famer with a bad wrist and a good story.
