Nope, it's not that he retired — we already knew that. Drew Brees, the greatest quarterback in the history of the New Orleans Saints, gave a new and sort of heartbreaking peek behind the curtain of his retirement. It turns out that Brees' underwhelming 2020 season was in fact due to a lingering injury. But we all knew that — the real kicker is that Brees, by his own standards, was operating well under full capacity for all except one game:

“I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I only felt really good in one game [Week 4 at Detroit], from the perspective I had all the tools in my toolbox,” the Saints legend said, via Jeff Duncan of TheAthletic.com “I had a lot of limitations throughout the season as to what I could and couldn’t do. And I recognized that. And that’s really hard for a competitor. It’s really hard to know what you should be able to do, and yet you can’t, because of various injuries or things that are taking place with your body.”

Brees then went into further detail with his own struggle in the last season of his career with the Saints:

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“I had this abdominal thing that I was dealing with [for] pretty much most of the season. As a QB everything you do is rotation. And when you can’t rotate the way that you want, you all of a sudden begin to accommodate. Everything for you kind of narrows. I can’t make that throw. I can’t make that throw. I can’t make that throw. So what’s now in my toolbox? It’s harder to play the game that way. It is. And yet you’ve got to find a way to still get it done. And I felt like we did that. But it was difficult.”

Of course, Brees was his usual hyper-efficient self when he was able to take the field this season. A 70% completion rate is nothing to scoff at, nor is a 106.4 quarterback rating. But his yards and touchdowns were all on the downturn, and strangely enough, he was never listed as having any abdominal issues when active. At least now, Brees gets to enjoy retirement as arguably the greatest Saints in history. Enjoy that Super Bowl ring, Drew, you've earned it.