Life's a Brees for Saints' Offense

PHILADELPHIA -- Everybody who's watched Drew Brees and the Saints play their first two games of the season has been thinking it -- as ridiculous as it is, it's still the only conclusion you can draw after you watch a team rack up 936 yards and 93 points in two weeks. So it was nice to hear Brees, after thrashing the Eagles 48-22 on Sunday, actually say it.

"We play at a confidence level on offense where we believe, every time we touch the ball, we're going to get points," Brees said.

Yeah. That's pretty much the way it looks, too.

Brees completed 25-of-34 passes for 311 yards and three touchdowns Sunday against Philadelphia, then broke down this game as if he were an excited teenager who'd just won State. His words and his eyes revealed that, yes, the Saints are in fact having as much fun on offense as they appear to be having, and that it's not a major surprise to the man who's making all the throws.

Asked about his second touchdown pass to Marques Colston, Brees said of the throw: "Exact spot. Exact spot. Tell me who else is going to go up and get that. It's him or nobody."

On tight end Jeremy Shockey, who appears healthy and is enjoying an early-season resurgence with the high-flying Saints: "He's been awesome. I trust him, he trusts me and everything that happens out there, we're on the same page."

On his relationship with Colston: "I trust him more than I've ever trusted anybody out on that field. Even when something happens out there that maybe we didn't anticipate, it just seems like I'm able to feel what he's going to do and he knows where the ball is going to be, and it makes it look like we knew it was going to be that way all along."

The Eagles, who dominated the Panthers a week earlier in their season opener, didn't have much to say about the specific ways Brees and the Saints attacked their defense. They did express some serious regret, though, about the special-teams gaffes that more than once gave Brees a short field with which to work.

"Whenever we hurt ourselves," safety Macho Harris said, "he just capitalized on it."

Opportunistic is one of many things this Saints offense is. Unpredictable is another. Brees said the Saints go into each week without any clue which of their skill-position players is going to be the star of the game, but with the confidence that it will be somebody.

"Did we know it was going to be Marques Colston's day today? No," Brees said. "We get into the heat of it and, all of a sudden, he's got the hot hand, so we're feeding him. The next game it might be Shockey. The next game it might be Devery (Henderson) or (Robert) Meachem, or Lance Moore. So I think that each of those guys knows that their opportunity will come."

The other thing they know is the central lesson the Eagles and everybody who watched it took out of this game. The premise on which the Saints' mighty offense is built. The most important thing you need to know if you're wondering what makes the Saints so good.

You ready for it? Here it comes:

"Drew Brees," Eagles defensive back Joselio Hanson said, "is an animal."