QB-DREW BREES(on offensive coordinator Cam Cameron) 12/22/04
"I had been here a year, so now we've been together three years. There were quite a few jokes exchanged back and forth those first couple days. The one thing I had over him though, was I beat him four times. He never beat me once. No, but we've gotten along great. I think he's done a great job here.
"I think he's very aware of matchups and trying to create matchups, trying to spread the ball around and give all of the weapons on offense an opportunity to make plays. You can tell throughout the course of a game, I mean, I can feel it. When he gets going on something that he feels is working, he sticks with it. When there's an adjustment that needs to be made, I think he and the coaches do an excellent job, not only just at halftime, but throughout the course of the game, of getting to things that they see, and obviously that he sees."
QB-DREW BREES(on facing adversity in the offseason) 12/22/04
"I truly believe you have to be faced with adversity, you have to go through something like that. I feel like I had to go through something like that in order to take my game to the level that I know that it can go. And to be honest, I don't feel like I've scratched the surface on what I can accomplish or what the team can accomplish."
QB-DREW BREES(on the turnaround this season) 12/22/04
"We're very happy to be in the position we are, but honestly, we expected to be here. That may sound crazy to a lot of people with the record we had last year and the facelift we had in the offseason with all the new players we had coming in and the youth of our team. We always stuck together; we always trusted one another. Myself, personally, I always believed I was going to be a great player in this league and I don't feel I've scratched the surface on what I can accomplish in this league or what this team can accomplish."
QB-DREW BREES(on the 1-2 start and his starting job) 12/22/04
"I've been benched three times. You learn very quickly that this game is all about results. If the team is losing football games and a change is going to be made, it's probably going to be the starting quarterback. As tough as that is to swallow sometimes, that's just the way it is. When we were sitting there 1-2, I realized, if we go down the same road as last year, there's going to be a change made."
QB-DREW BREES(on continuing to do his work) 12/22/04
"From the very beginning, I feel like I've done everything I possibly could to put myself in position to succeed and for this team to succeed."
QB-DREW BREES(on starting out 1-2 and finding themselves at home) 12/22/04
"It was one of those things where, with so many new faces, we were still trying to find ourselves as a team, still trying to form the attitude and find out our identity."
QB-DREW BREES(on calling Head Coach Marty Schottenheimer prior to training camp) 12/22/04
"I have always viewed myself as the starting quarterback of this team. I have never once pictured myself as anything but the starting quarterback of this football team. I felt it was my responsibility as the starting quarterback to address the team. It was an opportunity for me to bring us all together in a moment where there were no coaches, no media. The only people that was going to determine the future and the destiny of our team was us. There was nobody else."
QB-DREW BREES(on what it felt like to be pulled out of the Chicagogame) 12/22/04
"It's a terrible, awful feeling. At that time, I felt kind of helpless, almost; I was just trying way too hard. I wanted it so bad; I wanted things to work so bad. It was a time I needed to step back and just relax and let things clear up a little bit and just refocus and reevaluate. Like I said, that was the third time I had been pulled out of a game. The other two times, I raised hell. I was not coming out of the game. When Marty started walking over to me, I knew what he was going to do; I knew he was going to pull me out of the game. When he came up to me, I'm sure he expected, just by his facial expression and demeanor, I'm sure he expected that I was going to fight it like I had in the past. He said, 'Drew, I'm taking you out. I'm going to put Doug in.' I looked at him in the eye, and I said, 'I understand.' It was one of the hardest things I've had to do, look him in the eye and say, 'I understand.'."
QB-DREW BREES(on next season) 12/22/04
"I want to be here. I want to be a Charger. Obviously I understand how this business works and that there are a lot of possibilities. That's why you just worry about winning football games and all that stuff takes care of itself. But I want to be here long-term. I would love to play my entire career here in San Diego. If that happens, so be it. If it doesn't, then it wasn't meant to be and I'll be elsewhere, and that's fine, too."
