His draft position suggests New Orleans agrees. Shough is the Saints’ highest-drafted quarterback since Archie Manning was selected No. 2 overall in 1971.

“My thing is I’ve always been confident in myself and that’s my whole goal going into the NFL, is just to have fun with it,” Shough said. “You’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to go make every moment count but a lot of this stuff is in God’s hands, it’s out of your control, so you might as well just have fun.”

That outlook helped Shough not only lead Louisville to an 8-4 record but also to climb the draft board and out of the shadows to become the third quarterback selected in the draft, behind Cam Ward (No. 1, to Tennessee) and Jaxon Dart (25, to the Giants).

“He wasn’t the most highly recruited transfer quarterback by any means, but we liked what we saw,” Louisville Coach Jeff Brohm said. “He had some question marks that people had on him. We researched him, we felt like we knew what we were getting but you didn’t know for sure until you got him there.

“So, we got him here and right away he was an extremely hard worker, gave great effort, he was a good leader, he worked really hard and he was a good quarterback. And I just think that it wasn’t too much longer after we saw him throw on the field and got to see him in a few practices that we felt we had a really good quarterback on our hands, and we felt as long as he continued to progress he could have a very successful year.”

Attribute much of the success at Louisville to Shough’s rocky path to the Cardinals.

Before joining Louisville, he’d started 20 of 30 games in six seasons and completed 355 of 562 passes for 4,625 yards and 36 touchdowns, with 17 interceptions. He’d had to heal physically from broken bones and mentally from being replaced in the lineup. He grew and matured into a calm leader who wasn’t easily shaken, if he was shaken at all.

“We actually liked the fact that he had experience,” Brohm said. “We liked the fact that he had adversity and handled it pretty good. He’d been a starter, he’d been benched, he’d been a starter, he’d been benched, he got injured, he got knocked out of games – and we just felt he was a hungry quarterback that wanted to make this last year work.

“You could see talent on the video tape, you could see size, you could see athleticism, you could see an accurate passer in our opinion. Once we got him here and got him going, we felt the same way. We felt that if we surrounded him with good players he could have a very successful year and I think for the most part the entire year, he played at a high level. He did a really good job in every game and he gave us a chance to win.”