The most important position in the NFL so far this year is backup quarterback. Already, Dallas’s Tony Romo, Chicago’s Jay Cutler, Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger and New Orleans’s Drew Brees have been replaced by their understudies after suffering injuries.  Turning your season over to a No. 2 quarterback can be a terrifying proposition. There’s an obvious drop-off in talent, of course. But a bigger problem, NFL people say, is that many backup quarterbacks aren’t ready to be thrown into an NFL game because they’re not used to competition. Unlike every other position on a football team, where the starter is constantly battling to stay atop the depth chart, backups playing behind franchise quarterbacks feel they can put their feet up, carry a clipboard and leisurely sip Gatorade.  But in New Orleans, where Brees is battling a shoulder injury, the role of the backup is very different. Sure, there’s the same film-study and practices that every quarterback goes through. But then the backups are tasked with something unusual. They have to compete against Brees in everything.  There’s only one rule: Brees decides the games—often off the top of his head. It can be paddleboard races, pool, or bowling. On occasion, the competition involves actual football, too.  The result, Brees’s backups say, is a group more on their toes than perhaps any group of backups in the league.  “When you are entrenched as the starter, there’s ‘competition’ but not really. He gives you opportunities to have an actual competition between you and him for pride,” said quarterback Ryan Griffin, who spent the last three years in New Orleans before being released in training camp and catching on with Tampa Bay. “Is Kobe Bryant challenging a backup to H-O-R-S-E for everyone to see? What Drew does is incredibly rare.”  This has been a tactic for Brees’s entire career as a starter. Doug Flutie, who played with Brees in San Diego and is now an analyst for NBC Sports, remembers games being made up on the spot to get the competitive juices flowing. The idea takes on renewed importance this season as the nine-time Pro Bowler struggles with a shoulder injury that forced him to miss last week’s game against the Carolina Panthers. He’s listed as “day-to-day” for Sunday night’s marquee matchup against the Dallas Cowboys. Filling in for Brees against the Panthers, Luke McCown had the best performance of the backups who were called upon Sunday, completing 31-of-38 passes for 318 yards in a last-minute 27-22 loss.  Some of the challenges involving passing are filmed and dubbed the “Quarterback Challenge.” These are the more straightforward contests and the ones fans can see on the field during training camp. A team employee drives a cart from one side of the field to the other with different objects in the bed of the cart. The backups must nail different objects then tally up their scores. Hitting a huge black pad is one point, a smaller blue pad is two points, an even smaller cone is three points, for instance. The group has played quarterback Plinko, where they must hurl a ball onto a huge hill and try to get it to roll down into a cylinder waiting at the bottom. Another game, borrowed from “American Gladiators,” features the quarterbacks taking the ball from the top of different dummies, and attempting throws while a team employee pegs tennis balls at them. Last year, McCown beat Brees in a tiebreaking throw-off.  But those who know Brees say the competition really starts when the cameras are off and the games get weird. One notably heated contest? Quarterback golf, in which players set a target hundreds of yards away and throw the ball toward it in increments, as you would a golf shot. The courses are so long and fiendishly constructed that the quarterbacks must consider genuine golf strategies—“laying up, throw it over here, dog leg left,” said Griffin. Brees doesn’t win every event. The quarterbacks keep two different tallies, one for the quarterback-related competition and an overall total. Griffin said it’s actually easier to beat Brees in the passing competition than the overall challenge—which may also include impromptu bowling games, shooting pool, clay-pigeon shooting and anything else the quarterbacks may see over the course of the off-season.  There’s one challenge in which his backups say Brees is almost impossible to beat: The drop kick competition. That’s because he was taught how to perform the skill by his old clipboard holder Flutie, the best in the business. The Saints go through coffin-corner competitions where they try to kick the ball as close to the goal line as possible without it rolling into the end zone. That’s a game that Flutie passed down from the Patriots of the late 1980s. Flutie, Brees and former Chargers punter Darren Bennett, a onetime Australian Rules Football player, perfected the backspin on their kicks to the point that their competitions were the stuff of lore.  Brees has taken the drop-kick competitions with him to New Orleans. “He has it down pretty good,” Flutie said, adding that Brees would compete against him to throw a perfect spiral or toss footballs into a barrel. The games helped Brees take his mind off the seriousness of the practice, Flutie said, and stay sharp himself. “He had perfect form [in the games] it would drive me freaking nuts,” he said.  When Brees returned to San Diego this off-season, he hosted some teammates—including Griffin—and taught them how to paddleboard. Within minutes it evolved into another competition. “It becomes who can stay on the longest, who can get to the green buoy the fastest, knocking each other off,” Brees told NBC’s San Diego affiliate. That is just part of the fun.  Write to Kevin Clark at kevin.clark@wsj.com
The New Orleans Saints have a quarterback competition—but this one involves bowling, paddleboarding, pool and anything else star quarterback Drew Brees thinks up