The Saints’ Sad Quarterback Competition Is Over

NFLNFL The Saints’ Sad Quarterback Competition Is Over Spencer Rattler was one of the NFL’s worst quarterbacks as a rookie, so should the Saints be worried that he beat out their 2025 second-round pick? Getty Images/Ringer illustration

By Riley McAtee Aug. 27, 2:23 am UTC • 7 min

In the 2024 offseason, NFL teams selected six quarterbacks in the first 12 picks of the draft, by far the most ever. As rookies, these passers had their ups and downs. One carried his team to the NFC championship game. One nearly set the record for sacks taken in a season. One never got a chance to play due to an injury.

Where do these players stand going into year two? Is this group still set to change the league—or were NFL teams overzealous when they drafted these guys back in April of last year? Welcome to Sophomore QB Week at The Ringer. This week, we’re breaking down the play and futures of Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy, and Bo Nix. Today, we’re looking at a seventh 2024 draft pick, fifth-rounder Spencer Rattler, who goes into 2025 as the Saints’ starter.

It feels appropriate that the Saints news-dumped their starting quarterback announcement just after the most talked-about engagement in human history. After all, it is somewhat embarrassing to admit that the soon-to-be-26-year-old rookie you took in the second round of the draft four months ago lost a camp battle to your fifth-round pick from a year prior, a player who by most metrics was one of the NFL’s worst quarterbacks last season.

But that’s where the Saints are at, and so within two hours of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announcing they are getting married, New Orleans revealed that Spencer Rattler, and not Tyler Shough, would start for the team at quarterback this season.

Spencer Rattler has been named the #Saints starting QB, Kellen Moore announced pic.twitter.com/AECr38PC2v — New Orleans Saints (@Saints) August 26, 2025

In naming Rattler his starting QB, new Saints head coach Kellen Moore was effusive in his praise of the young passer’s growth. “He's done an awesome job this offseason,” Moore said. “He's made some really good decisions throughout this whole entire process. And you know, his ability to make plays with his arm and his feet have certainly shown up. And so I'm really excited about Spencer. He's earned this opportunity. He's going to do a tremendous job for us.”

Moore also didn’t shut the door on Shough, the quarterback the team just drafted out of Louisville in April, adding that “I’m a big believer in just the importance of developing quarterbacks, developing them the right way.” He plans to give Shough opportunities to develop with New Orleans’s scout team.

But this all has to be at least a somewhat discouraging outcome for the Saints. New Orleans made a big splash taking Shough with the 40th overall pick, signalling that in the wake of Derek Carr’s retirement, they weren’t going to be content waiting until next offseason to select their quarterback of the future. And Shough is not supposed to be a raw talent that needs time to be molded to the pro game. Shough played seven seasons in college, earning multiple years of extra eligibility after back-to-back-to-back season-ending injuries while at Texas Tech. He literally earned three degrees and played for three different programs. As such, he was billed as experienced and pro-ready—so to see him lose this job to Rattler is a bit of a surprise.

That’s especially true because Rattler isn’t some steady-handed veteran, a la Joe Flacco in Cleveland. He’s a second-year player who is a year younger than Shough (to the day!) and who performed poorly in six starts (plus another game in which he subbed in early for an injured Carr) last year for New Orleans. The stat line for Rattler in those seven appearances is underwhelming: he completed just 57 percent of his passes for 1,317 yards, four touchdowns, and five interceptions. That’s just an average of 188.1 yards per game.

Advanced metrics are even more harsh to Rattler. Per RBSDM.com, among the 40 quarterbacks who logged at least 250 plays last season, Rattler ranked 39th in EPA per play, 38th in success rate, and 39th in completion percentage over expectation. He was literally the worst quarterback in Pro Football Focus’s grades, ranking 42nd out of 42 qualifiers.

The big problem? He simply didn’t make impactful plays, nor did he protect the football. Per PFF, his “big-time throw” percentage stood at 2.4 percent, tied for the fourth-lowest mark among 44 qualifying quarterbacks. But his turnover-worthy play percentage was 4.9 percent, tied for the third-highest mark. Plus, his pressure-to-sack percentage was 22.4 percent, the 10th highest, indicating some poor pocket management. To top it all off, his adjusted completion percentage was 69.0 percent, the second-lowest mark in the league, pointing to accuracy issues. There’s essentially nothing Rattler did particularly well in 2024—it was a complete disaster. At one point, he was benched for Jake Haener, whom the team waived earlier this week.

That doesn’t mean we should completely shut the door on the possibility of a Rattler renaissance in year two. He has high-end arm talent and was once talked about like a future first-round pick before he lost the starting job at Oklahoma to Caleb Williams during the 2021 season and transferred to South Carolina. The Saints offense was a top-to-bottom disaster as well, beyond the poor quarterback play. The franchise entered the 2024 season trying to remain competitive in the NFC South despite an aging roster and disastrous salary cap situation. It worked … for two games. They started the season with Carr at quarterback, and the offense roared out of the gate with back-to-back wins and a pair of 40-plus-point performances.

It was a mirage. Even before injuries started to take their toll (and nearly every important offensive player, including receiver Chris Olave, running back Alvin Kamara, tight end Taysom Hill, center Erik McCoy and multiple other linemen, missed time for New Orleans last season) the image of a blazing offense and playoff contender disappeared. The team lost their next seven in a row, Carr suffered an oblique injury in Week 5, and after Week 9 the team fired head coach Dennis Allen. Another injury to Carr—a fractured hand—sidelined him for the final four games of the season and may have contributed to his offseason retirement.

Rattler bounced in and out of the lineup in between Carr’s injuries. But he was always playing behind a patchwork offensive line, and he barely played with Olave The Saints lost all seven games in which Rattler appeared and went 5-12 overall.

So the franchise entered this year in need of a refresh. They hired Moore, fresh off a Super Bowl title as the Eagles offensive coordinator, and he assembled an entirely new coaching staff, bringing in Doug Nussmeier from Philadelphia to be the new offensive coordinator and Brandon Staley, the former Chargers head coach, to guide the defense. The team made a few moves in free agency, like poaching safety Justin Reid from Kansas City and re-signing pass rusher Chase Young, but mostly focused on restructuring some veteran contracts in order to right a salary cap situation that had gotten out of hand in recent years.

When they made a meat-and-potatoes selection of offensive tackle Kelvin Banks Jr. with the ninth pick in the draft, it seemed like New Orleans was going to take a longer approach to a rebuild and wait until next offseason to select a quarterback. But the ever-stubborn Saints weren’t content to wait, and took Shough on Day 2.

This was the final quarterback battle to be settled this offseason, and perhaps the one with the least at stake. Because to be fair to both Rattler and Shough, the Saints are not likely to be very good in 2025 regardless of who plays quarterback. The team ranked 22nd in DVOA last year, and the outlook has only declined heading into this season. The Saints have the lowest win total at most sportsbooks, with that line commonly being set at 4.5. They are -1600 to miss the playoffs, ahead of only the Cleveland Browns.

It will be a tall order for Rattler to turn this ship around. And the history for him is not great. In the Super Bowl era, only a small handful of quarterbacks drafted in the fifth round or later have gone on to have successful NFL careers, with most of those having taken place decades ago. The only quarterback in the league slated to be a Week 1 starter with a lower draft standing than Rattler is San Francisco’s Brock Purdy. Tom Brady was a truly one-in-a-million find. If Rattler can have even a journeyman type of career—think the likes of Matt Cassel or Gus Frerotte—that’d be a huge success.

The Saints, though, are looking for more than that out of their starter in 2025, obviously. That’s why they took Shough in April. And while it’s impossible to write off Shough after losing just one QB battle—the same way it’s impossible to write off Rattler after a poor rookie season—if the Saints are as bad as oddsmakers think they will be, they’ll have one of the top picks in next year’s draft. With a number of passers getting first-round attention—including New Orleans native Arch Manning, the grandson of Saints legend Archie, though it’s unclear whether Arch will leave Texas after this —the expectation should be that they use their top pick on a quarterback. And then both Rattler and Shough will be looking for a future outside of New Orleans.

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