The New Orleans Saints have started nine different quarterbacks since Drew Brees retired in the 2021 offseason, and the latest ranking of that stretch makes the turnover look even worse than the number suggests. The list ranges from one-game placeholders to Spencer Rattler, whose 1-13 record as a starter did not match the way he actually played.
That count matters now because the Saints are still living with the fallout of losing the one player who had made the position feel settled for so long. Drew Brees had been the standard, and since he left, the team has cycled through answers that were temporary, incomplete or both. The ranking puts names in order, but the bigger story is how rarely the Saints have found a starter who could hold the job long enough to change the conversation.
Ian Book is the clearest marker of how thin things got. His only start came in Week 16 of the 2021 season on Thursday Night Football against the Miami Dolphins, and the Saints lost 20-3 in the Superdome after he threw a pick six on the opening offensive drive. Book finished his Saints starting career 0-1 with 135 passing yards and two interceptions. That is the kind of line that tells you a team was not just searching for depth. It was searching for anyone who could get through a night.
Jake Haener was not asked to do much better. He started one game in Week 15 of the 2024 season against the Washington Commanders, was benched at halftime for Spencer Rattler and finished with 49 yards and a pick. The Saints lost after Jayden Daniels made one too many plays to overcome, which is the sort of ending that leaves a backup quarterback with almost no room to argue his case. One half later, the job had already moved on.
The Saints did find a few starts that looked more like stability, even if the records never stayed clean. Taysom Hill went 3-1 as a starter, passed for 815 yards with three touchdowns and four interceptions, and completed 55% of his throws. Trevor Siemian gave the team a brief lift when he relieved Jameis Winston in Week 8 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and helped push the Saints to 5-2, but he then went 0-4 as a starter, even while throwing for 995 yards with a 10-to-3 touchdown-to-interception ratio. That split is the best proof that quarterback judgment in New Orleans has often depended on which version of the job a player was asked to do.
Rattler is the harder case. He went 1-13 as the Saints starter across the 2024 and 2025 seasons, but the eye test was much kinder than the record. He put up 2,768 passing yards and 11 touchdowns, and the losses were not all on him. The Saints kept asking young quarterbacks to carry fragile situations, then judging them as if the roster around them had been steady enough to support a fair test. That is why the ranking lands where it does: not just because the Saints have used nine starters since Brees retired, but because several of them were forced into roles that did not give them a real chance to look like long-term answers.
The next question is not whether the Saints have had quarterback problems; they clearly have. It is whether the organization can finally stop treating the position as a weekly rescue plan and find one starter who does not need a ranking to explain how unstable things have been.
