The New Orleans Saints have a problem in their quarterbacks room. It’s got nothing to do with the players, though. Drew Brees will go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame once his career is over. Teddy Bridgewater did everything a backup should do in his audition for taking the reins from Brees. And utility player Taysom Hill did it all.

Their problem is a ticking clock. Brees turned 40 this month and showed some worrisome signs that he could be approaching the cliff Peyton Manning and Brett Favre fell off late in their careers. He struggled with ball placement on tape, and stats suggest he slowed down as the season went on. There’s no shame in admitting that after a decade of keeping the Saints competitive, Brees is at a point where he needs more help.

But that’s another story. What we’re digging into is the long game for figuring out life after Brees in New Orleans. Bridgewater would probably be a fine heir, though his lone start in 2018 was uninspiring (and not helped by the fact two offensive linemen started after being signed off the street two days beforehand). But what if he doesn’t want to wait one more year to start and leaves, and the Saints aren’t willing to invest their only significant 2019 draft choice in someone who can’t help Brees win a Super Bowl? Especially in what may be the final year of his career?

So that brings us to Russell Wilson. The Seattle Seahawks quarterback has thrived in the NFL — his teams have never finished worse than 9-7, and he’s proved he can make plays in an offense despite his smaller stature (sound familiar?). Wilson led the NFL in passing touchdowns in 2017 (34) and passer rating in 2015 (110.1), all while dealing with some of the worst offensive lines in recent NFL history. He’s been sacked fewer than 41 times just once in his career — as a rookie in 2012. He’s also scheduled to become a free agent in March 2020, just like Brees.

He could benefit from a Saints offense with real blockers and quick-hitting passes designed to protect the quarterback. Per NFL Next Gen Stats, Brees put up one of the fastest times to throw in 2018 (2.59 seconds). Compare that to Wilson, who averaged 3.01 seconds. That half-second is a lifetime for a quarterback, and it’s often due to the pressure in his face and the time it takes his receivers to get open. It resulted in Brees being sacked just 17 times on 506 dropbacks; by comparison, Wilson was sacked 51 times against only 478 dropbacks.

So, if Wilson is so good, why would the Seahawks let him go?

Well, it’s because Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer have done all they can to make their team less reliant on its quarterback. Per Josh Hermsmeyer of FiveThirtyEight, “Over the course of the 2018 season, there was no three-play sequence that Seattle favored more than rush-rush-pass. The Seahawks called rush-rush-pass 26 percent of the time, a rate 10 percentage points higher than league average.”

Seattle wants to take the ball out of Wilson’s hands and run more, even if it loses them football games. They’re the last, or at least most prominent, believers in a long-held football axiom that good teams have to run the ball to win (they don’t; read the FiveThirtyEight piece for a deeper explanation).

Another reason for Seattle’s stubbornness? Maybe they don’t want to commit serious salary cap resources to Wilson once his contract is up in 2020. The Seahawks had the most success when Wilson was playing on a cost-effective rookie deal, allowing the team to keep its vaunted Legion of Boom defense together while surrounding him with stars like Marshawn Lynch, Golden Tate and Doug Baldwin. Since Wilson received his four-year, $87.6 million contract extension in 2015, the Seahawks have not made it past the divisional round. That has do as much with effective drafting as free agent spending (and schematic choices, like neglecting to use their great young quarterback), but it’s possible Seattle’s front office thinks they can put a team together that can win without a passer like Wilson airing it out. Could be that they envision a team that can run well and often, and ask its quarterback (preferably a rookie) to throw sparingly.

If so, they certainly wouldn’t give Wilson another big extension. Particularly at the rate quarterbacks are being paid. Kirk Cousins received a fully guaranteed contract worth $84 million over three years from the Vikings. Aaron Rodgers agreed to a four-year, $134 million extension and he’s five years older than either Cousins or Wilson.

Wilson is going to cash in, and the Saints could be in position to pay him. Brees is under contract for the 2019 season, with a huge salary cap hit of $33.5 million. While Brees is under contract for the 2020 season, that year becomes voided if he is on the roster for the last day of the 2019 fiscal year. The Saints just added it in to spread out his salary cap damage. So he’ll also cost the Saints $10.5 million against the cap in 2020 whether he continues to play or not, and it is unavoidable. That number in 2020 goes up if the Saints restructure his current deal, which is eating up about 17.5 percent of the projected 2019 salary cap at $191 million.

A quick aside: You’ll see the assertion thrown around that no quarterback making more than $20 million per year has won a Super Bowl, which is technically correct. But it’s also very much incomplete. A better perspective is that no team has won the Super Bowl with a quarterback taking up more than 12.3 percent of their salary cap space. That allows us to consider all 50-plus years of NFL history, not just the recent years in which quarterback salaries ballooned.

But back to Brees, Wilson and the 2020 season. Let’s assume that the Saints do not restructure Brees’ contract in 2019. Winning Super Bowl LIV with that huge salary cap hit would be unprecedented, sure. But they could gut it out. The Saints have so many talented core players on rookie contracts that they can balance it out for a season.

Our next assumption: Brees retires after the 2019 season. He hopefully does so after a Super Bowl victory parade, and then gets a second line to celebrate his star-studded career. That gives the Saints somewhere around $102 million in salary cap space for the 2020 season to not just pursue Wilson, but re-sign free agent wide receiver Michael Thomas and get an early start on re-upping running back Alvin Kamara. They can make it work.

So imagine that scenario. Brees retires in glory, and in steps Wilson, eager to really flex on the league and show what he can do in an offense that lets him throw at will. And he’s paired up with superstars like Thomas and Kamara, with Sean Payton coordinating the entire operation. It’s a great picture. But putting it to canvas will be a challenge.