While participating in Super Bowl Week festivities, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees discussed the importance of player safety on the “NFL AM” set and gave his thoughts on former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. A few of Brees’ thoughts:

On Williams’ rant before the 2011 NFC Divisional Playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers: “I heard that same video and he sounds like a madman. He sounds reckless, careless. Certainly even that rhetoric does not belong in the game. … There’s a lot of things that come out of people’s mouths in the locker room, on game day, in the heat of the moment.”

On what others players say: “This year even, as I watch the games — and you know there’s microphones everywhere — I heard of plenty of stuff. ‘Let’s go knock these dudes out’ … that, if you take it for face value, and you take it out of context, there would be a lot of fines and suspensions getting thrown out. So my point is, you’ve got to be able to separate rhetoric from intent. Can you measure intent? Can you say that the New Orleans Saints or anybody else went out with the intent to seriously hurt somebody, concuss them, to get them knocked out of the game, whatever. No, I don’t think you can. You can take an audio tape, you can take a microphone off the field, but there’s certain things about this game that I don’t think you’re going to eliminate — guys talking crazy on game day when they’re all hyped up.”

On player safety: “When you talk about player health and safety, when you talk about concussions, head and neck injuries, the long-term effects of those things, those are serious, serious things. Something that we should continue to take a hard look at in regards to the equipment that we use, the rules that are in place, any number of things. How penalties and fines are handled. The point is we want to make this game as safe as possible, not just for the guys that are playing now, but for the kids that are coming up and following in our footsteps. It’s imperative that we continue to make those types of changes and also take care of the guys that played this game before us and the guys that are kind of on their way out now, just knowing that we got to do a better job of monitoring this and making sure the guys are taken care of long term.”

– Bill Bradley, contributing editor