In this offseason series, Athlon Sports' Doug Farrar asks the One Big Question for every NFL team that will become readily apparent when the season does begin, and the lights are at their brightest. We continue with the New Orleans Saints, who are hoping against hope that either Spencer Rattler or Tyler Shough can solve a really weird quarterback situation after Derek Carr's retirement. Can new head coach Kellen Moore figure it out?
If Larry, Moe, and Curly of the Three Stooges, or the Delta fraternity in Animal House (led by Senator John Blutarsky, of course), played musical chairs, the game would likely end with everybody on the floor, several of the the contestants unconscious, and nobody sitting in a chair.
This may well be what the New Orleans Saints' quarterback situation looks like in 2025.
After Derek Carr's surprise medical-related retirement in March, the franchise was left with Spencer Rattler, the 2024 fifth-round pick from South Carolina, and new head coach Kellen Moore added Louisville's Tyler Shough with the 40th overall pick in the second round. Obviously, when your head coach is also designing your offense, you want said head coach to have a young quarterback he's comfortable with, but let's just say that Shough going in the second round raised more than a few eyebrows.
Last season in six starts, Rattler completed 130 passes in 228 attempts for 1,317 yards, four touchdowns, fiver interceptions, and a passer rating of 70.4. As was the case throughout his collegiate career, Rattler was an equal distributor of plays that would have you shaking your head, wondering how he did that...
...and plays that would have you shaking your head, wondering why he did that.
In some ways, Rattler reminds me of another young quarterback with arm arrogance who started his NFL career in the NFC South — Jameis Winston, who was also capable of making every possible throw. All of the good ones, and all of the bad ones.
"I got a lot of great experiences from the games I played in," Rattler said in February. "Obviously, not easy circumstances, kind of thrown in the fire, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I think that's going to propel me and prepare me for what's to come.
"It was good to go through a little adversity as a team, and [I] personally learned a ton, put a lot of good stuff on tape, and a lot of good stuff to learn from and improve on."
As for the 25-year-old Shough, who started his college tenure with Oregon in 2018, transferred to Texas Tech in 2021, and moved once again to Louisville in 2023, the reviews are mixed. There have been highs along the way: He led the nation in yards per attempt, adjusted net yards per attempt, yards per completion, and passer rating with Oregon in 2020, and last season with the Cardinals, he completed 243 of 391 passes for 3,191 yards, 23 touchdowns, six interceptions, and a passer rating of 101.1.
But this is also the same guy who threw just 16 touchdown passes and six interceptions at Oregon, then threw 20 touchdowns to 10 interceptions at Texas Tech. The 2024 season was the first one in which Shough had more than 177 passing attempts in a season, and there's legitimate concern about a quarterback who had that much time to establish himself as the alpha somewhere, and never really did. Shough found himself on the wrong side of more than one quarterback battle, and suffered a string of injuries over the last few years that included a broken collarbone in 2021, and a broken fibula in 2023.
"My whole thing was, 'It's probably not going to work out but I'm going to give it everything I can and if it does, great and if it doesn't, I'm going to be fine and I'm going to make the most of it,'" Shough said in May of his turn to Louisville.
It did finally work out to a point, but in an NFL where pressure compounds on quarterbacks over time, Shough completed 52 of 123 passes under duress for 853 yards, six touchdowns, four interceptions, and a passer rating of 68.9. To be fair, Shough was great when blitzed last season — 79 completions in 137 attempts for 1,144 yards, 12 touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 108.0 — but with a faulty GPS when disrupted, and little more than functional mobility when chased out of the pocket, Shough isn't the first guy you think of when the NCAA's best second-reaction quarterbacks come to mind.
The good news is that Shough is a coach's favorite — or at least he became one when Louisville head coach Jeff Brohm got hold of him.
"He wasn't the most highly recruited transfer quarterback by any means, but we liked what we saw," Brohm recently said. "He had some question marks that people had on him. We researched him, we felt like we knew what we were getting, but you didn't know for sure until you got him there.
"So, we got him here and right away he was an extremely hard worker, gave great effort, he was a good leader, he worked really hard and he was a good quarterback. And I just think that it wasn't too much longer after we saw him throw on the field and got to see him in a few practices that we felt we had a really good quarterback on our hands, and we felt as long as he continued to progress, he could have a very successful year."
Shough, who is the Saints' highest-drafted quarterback since the franchise selected Archie Manning second overall in the 1971 NFL draft, has the pole position for the starting job in 2025 based on draft capital spent, but at this point, there's no real way to know whether Shough or Rattler will take the reins.
Kellen Moore, who has played in, coached, and designed just about every kind of NFL passing game through the years, is not in any huge hurry to make a decision in that regard. Neither is offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier.
"I think that's our big emphasis — we just keep building all summer long," Moore said in mid-June of Shough and Rattler, and the process therein after minicamps. "Even when they leave here, now it's on their own time, but they're still continuing to build, and we just roll right into training camp, and I think that's the big thing."
Not a lot of ramp-up time for whoever the starter is. but things are where they are.
"As we did when they first got here, we're going to sit down with them and say, 'Hey, here's how we view your strengths,'" Nussmeier said. "'Here's some things we'd really like you to work at to get better, and [we] try and give them kind of their checklist to help them improve their individual physical skill sets."
Which is generally what you want to do with young backups, as opposed to imminent starters.
The 2025 Saints are caught in a trap of their own design. Bollixed by Carr's retirement, and not in a financial position to avail themselves of any immediate quarterback help at the highest level, they're going to have to work through the bugs and the kinks this season while everybody else on the roster gets another year older.
But hey... there's a fine young quarterback who plays at LSU about an hour away from the Superdome named Garrett Nussmeier, and yes, that's Doug's son. So, maybe the Saints just have to wait it out for now, and shine it on in 2026.
