Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment, we focus on New Orleans Saints rookie quarterback Tyler Shough, who may have shown enough to help the franchise solve a quarterback problem that’s been evident since Drew Brees hung up his cleats.
Coming into the 2025 season, the New Orleans Saints were on a very short list of the teams dealing
with the NFL’s worst/most undefined quarterback situations. Derek Carr’s medical retirement in May left the Saints with two realistic options — second-year fifth-round pick Spencer Rattler, and 2025 second-round pick Tyler Shough out of Louisville. Neither seemed tremendously exciting on the surface, and the general national thought was that without some kind of established veteran added to the roster, the Saints were basically punting on the 2025 season, and giving new head coach Kellen Moore precious little at the game’s most important position.
Rattler started the first eight games of the season, and while he had his moments (the Week 2 performance against the 49ers was a very pleasant surprise), the offense wasn’t humming, the wins weren’t happening, and Moore pulled Rattler in favor of Shough in the Saints’ 23-3 Week 8 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This after Rattler was responsible for four turnovers in the 26-14 Week 7 loss to the Chicago Bears told you that Moore wasn’t making his decision off of one bad game.
“Tyler’s starting, so we’re not looking back on that,” Moore said on October 29. “Obviously, the goal is to let Tyler play and get going, and Spencer knows that his role is to be the backup, and he’s supposed to help Tyler in any possible way. He did an excellent job today running the scout team.”
Ouch. “He did an excellent job today running the scout team” is about as much as you can get away with damning a quarterback with faint praise, but there it was.
Not that Shough was any sort of immediate franchise savior. In relief of Rattler against the Bucs, he completed 17 of 30 passes for 170 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 53.2. Shough’s first NFL start came against the Los Angeles Rams and their vicious defense in Week 9, so you’d want to give the rookie credit for simply surviving that. It was a 34-10 loss for the then 1-8 Saints, and Shough completed just 15 of 24 passes for 174 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 81.3, but he did put together some big-time throws against a defense that has put quite a few quarterbacks in the blender this season.
In reviewing the Rams tape for this article, Shough’s pocket movement showed up as a positive more than once, and that’s a very good thing… because this isn’t a guy who’s going to wow you with second-reaction stuff outside the pocket.
That said, when Shough has had to get outside, he’s done pretty well, with 16 completions outside the pocket on 33 attempts for 195 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 97.4. Shough has also taken eight of his 22 sacks outside the pocket, so it’s more of an occasional thing you want him doing. Overall when pressured, he’s completed 23 of 48 passes for 263 yards, two touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 61.4. Shough is better when blitzed, which he was in college, because he has a nice sense of how to exploit the voids when defenses bring extra people after him.
We’re talking about Shough here as the Saints’ possible future QB1 primarily because of two games against the Carolina Panthers — a 17-7 win in Week 10, and last Sunday’s 20-17 victory. In those two games, Shough completed 43 of 59 passes for 554 yards, three touchdowns, no picks, and a passer rating of 118.9. When you complete 24 of 32 for 272 yards, a touchdown, no picks, and a passer rating of 110.4 as Shough did on Sunday, that’ll perk people up in the building.
As my buddy Dan Orlovsky pointed out, Shough’s ability to take in the entire complexity of Moore’s offense allowed the passing game to expand, and this has been especially true for Chris Olave.
“It’s huge,” Olave said of Shough’s performance and development. “Having somebody back there who’s fearless. He took a great amount of hits today, kept bouncing back in, and getting back up, so that shows a lot as a leader, and it is great for the team. We’ve got to keep up the momentum and keep winning.”
Veteran edge-rusher Cam Jordan, who has been through all of the team’s quarterback perambulations in the post-Drew Brees era, was positively rhapsodic postgame regarding Shough’s potential.
“You go look at his tape and there is a reason why he led Louisville to where he did,” Jordan said. “There is a reason why when he got his turn, he has shown his ability. He had time to develop. You don’t just create a diamond. A diamond is out of pressure, hard work, effort. It’s stuck in the earth. It’s got to be compacted into what it is. It starts off as dirt or coal, whatever. It’s got to get turned into a diamond. Hopefully, it’s going to be a diamond. He is being molded. He’s developing. In a few games, you have seen how much growth he has shown. That is potential. Let’s go capture it each and every game. Let’s leave nothing unturned. Guys are playing with so much heart. It just hasn’t turned our way a lot. Now you see that we are winning. All of a sudden, we are winning these close games. That builds confidence.
“I wish there were another 13 games in the season.”
When you have the veteran buy-in on both sides of the ball, that says a lot, because it doesn’t always happen for young quarterbacks… and when it doesn’t, you can tell. Having your head coach’s endorsement is the other key.
“Just his steadiness,” Moore said of Shough on Sunday night. ”His steadiness is really special. I think it’s really important when you play quarterback in this league. There are a lot of hard downs. You’re not going to convert every single one of them. Your ability to go from one to the next and take advantage of the opportunity presented, again, he made some big-time plays.
“I think [he’s] just executing at a really high level and understanding the situational aspect. There were a lot of situational plays that came up toward the end of this game. To execute at that high of a level, I thought, credit to him and really, the entire offense.”
We’ll see what happens in the last three weeks of the season. But if the Saints can head into 2026 with that quarterback thing at least relatively solved, it obviously takes a lot of the burden off when it comes to whatever the Saints are able to accomplish with the voodoo they do when it comes to the salary cap.
