How’s this for your New Orleans Saints Play of the Day? There’s just one day left until the Saints kick off their 2024 regular season, which means Drew Brees’ game-winning 1-yard touchdown run against the Atlanta Falcons in 2018 is today’s deserving highlight.
It was a tough game with the dirty birds, going all the way to overtime. The Saints won the coin toss and Brees took over at the New Orleans 20-yard line. What happened next was classic. Brees conducted a surgical 15-play, 80-yard drive (completing 9 of his 11 passes) going all the way down to Atlanta’s goal line before he popped over the offensive line and thrust the ball into the end zone for a game-winning score. The “Brees leap” became one of No. 9’s signature plays on fourth-and-short and goal-line situations like this one, and he came through again for the game-winning score in overtime against the Saints’ oldest rivals. See it for yourself.
But most Saints fans who caught this game live wouldn’t point to the overtime touchdown as Brees’ most iconic play of the day. That honor belongs to his 7-yard scramble, when Brees put a pair of Falcons defenders in the spin cycle so he could dive into the end zone and help force the game into overtime. You can find that one here.
Either way, both plays went down in the scorebook as touchdown runs, and this was just the second time in Brees’ illustrious career he was credited with multiple scores on the ground. The last time he achieved that? 2009’s memorable comeback win over the Miami Dolphins, where Brees helped power the team to a 46-34 win after falling into a 24-3 deficit. The Saints never faced that kind of challenge in this 2018 matchup in Atlanta, but that game still featured seven lead changes before Brees put it away in overtime.
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