No record, no win

• By LES EAST
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Dec 29, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Saints quarterback Drew Brees went into the season finale against Carolina in the Superdome hoping to pull off a nearly impossible parlay.

He needed 402 yards passing — against a defense that normally yields half of that — in order to break Dan Marino’s 24-year-old NFL record of 5,084 passing yard in a season.

Furthermore, he didn’t want to challenge the record by throwing an inordinate number of passes merely to try and break the record, but rather to do so within the context of a winning game plan.

He came tantalizingly close before falling short on both counts. An incomplete pass to Lance Moore on an ad-lib play on the game’s final play left him 15 yards short of Marino, though he completed just the second 5,000-yard passing season in league history.

Brees came up short just as his team did in falling to the Panthers, 33-31, despite him completing 30-of-49 for 386 yards and four touchdowns as he rallied New Orleans from a 30-10 deficit to a short-lived one-point lead that vanished with one second remaining.

“Winning the game was priority number one,” Brees said. “If the record came along with that, then great, and it almost did.”

With the Saints having been eliminated from playoff contention two weeks earlier, the long-shot chance to break Marino’s record had become at least as big a storyline as the game itself.

Brees estimated that at least 20 well-wishers had come up to him in public during the last week.

“No one said, ‘I hope you beat the Panthers,’” he recalled. “They all said, ‘I hope you get the record.’”

In the first quarter, New Orleans ran the ball three times and threw it four, completing two for 8 yards. Things picked up as Brees passed for 90 yards on a late-second quarter touchdown drive to get within 264 of Marino.

Meanwhile, the Panthers opened a 23-10 halftime lead that grew to 30-10 in the third quarter. That’s where the pursuit of the record and the play-calling intersected. Still, Brees was 168 yards short of Marino as New Orleans entered the fourth quarter trailing by 20.

On the second play of the fourth quarter, Brees threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Robert Meachem. On the next possession he passed for 101 yards, the final nine coming on a fourth-and-2 touchdown pass to Moore.

The Saints then forced a Carolina punt with Brees having nearly four minutes and needing 61 yards to pass Marino, but a 21-yard punt by Jason Baker left him with just a 45-yard field to work with.