At some point Monday night, Drew Brees will drop back, fire a pinpoint pass with that robotic right arm of his and step forward as the 10th career passing leader in the 99-year history of the NFL.
From Arnie Herber to Sammy Baugh, Bobby Layne, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas, Fran Tarkenton, Dan Marino, Brett Favre and Peyton Manning, the torch will have been passed from eight Hall of Famers to future first-ballot Hall of Famers in Manning and the 39-year-old Brees.
With 71,740 yards, the 18-year veteran needs 201 yards to leap past Favre (71,838) and Manning into first place. Averaging 323.8 yards per game, he should get there at some point in the third quarter of Monday's game against Washington.
How long he stays there will be interesting to watch. He has five of the league's nine 5,000-yard seasons — all in the past 10 years — and shows no signs of arm or interest fatigue.
The average reign has been 9.4 years. The longest belongs to Tarkenton, the former Viking who took the record from Unitas in 1976 and lost it to Marino 19 years later.
As a second-round pick of the Chargers in 2001, Brees played his first preseason game in Miami. He has talked about looking up at the ring of honor and seeing Marino's records and thinking, "How in the world do you play long enough to have a chance at that?"
Just four years later, his career was in jeopardy after he tore the labrum and rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder while trying to recover his own fumble in the 2005 season finale.
The Chargers essentially dumped him because they didn't think his career would survive the injury. The Dolphins pursued him, but flunked him on his physical, went a different direction and traded for Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper instead.
