The most useful thing that happened to the New Orleans offense in this Saints joint practice was not a highlight. It was volume. Shough and the starting group logged something in the neighborhood of 50 snaps against Jacksonville's first-team defense, and 50 snaps against somebody else's starters is a different animal than 50 snaps against your own defense, which already knows your checks, your cadence, and your tells.
That is the whole point of these summer arrangements. Preseason games give a young quarterback a series and a half against a defense that is mostly playing vanilla and mostly trying to get to the bus. A joint practice gives him scripted situational work, first team against first team, with coaches on both sides free to dial up whatever coverage they want to see solved. You can build a stress test. You cannot build one in the second quarter of an exhibition.
checked the almanac: the league used to run six preseason games before trimming to four in 1978, and teams have been hunting for ways to replace those lost live reps ever since. The joint practice is the answer they landed on. Fewer hits, more football.
One test passed does not close the file, and the schedule of examiners gets harder. Dallas and the Rams are the next two joint practice opponents on the New Orleans docket, and Dallas just added a name to the pile: the reporting says veteran outside linebacker Von Miller has agreed to terms with the Cowboys on a one-year deal. That is a man with a Super Bowl 50 MVP trophy and two rings, and whatever his workload ends up being, a defense that can rotate a pass rusher of that pedigree into a practice period is a defense that asks harder questions of a quarterback's internal clock.
So here is what I want to see next: not completion percentage, which is nearly meaningless in shorts-and-shells football, but whether Shough handles the same coverage rotation twice. First-team defenses in these sessions love to show a look, get you once, and show it again to find out if you learned. That is the exam.
Right now, one passed test, two tougher graders waiting.
