Is this the beginning of the end for Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints?

There’s already a sense of the 2015 NFL season being a lost cause for the New Orleans Saints, sitting at 0-2 with their star quarterback ruled out for Week 3 and perhaps beyond.

Drew Brees will not play against the Carolina Panthers and might be out for the Week 4 Sunday night contest against the Dallas Cowboys, assuming his injured shoulder does not heal significantly in the next week. After that, the team faces a tough road test at the Philadelpha Eagles, followed by a short-week game against the rival Atlanta Falcons, who are currently unbeaten, in Week 5.

Change could be in the works for the Saints.

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Will Brees be back next season? It’s too soon to say definitively what his future is, but he stands to count a whopping $27.6 million against the salary cap next season — the result of the front office’s bent for kicking the can down the road financially for year — for a team that currently has about 20 percent of its cap committed to players who no longer are on the roster. Even with a $10 million bump in the NFL’s cap up to the $150 million range expected, that could be unwieldy.

Brees might still be the best option for the Saints in 2016, even if he is in decline, because there might be no clear replacement option — either on the roster currently, or not. A lot of the drama of the free-agent class was eliminated with the contract extensions recently given to local boy Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger and even Nick Foles — Sam Bradford, anyone? — and the draft possibilities remain cloudy despite the fact that the Saints could end up selecting rather high next spring.

Beyond that, two other big elements tied to Brees remain in doubt. Head coach Sean Payton, with a second straight sub-.500 record, could be in trouble, as could GM Mickey Loomis. Owner Tom Benson, at age 88, might be a bit antsy to reverse the downward trend of his franchise, especially as no clear long-term heir to his ownership has been identified.

Payton and Loomis set a clear mission this offseason to clean up the perceived locker-room issues that tainted last season, and yet in doing so watched a lot of quality talent walk out the door without proper talent displacement to make up for the losses. That and their past missteps could come back to haunt them, if they haven’t already.

The NFC South remains a but of a morass until proven otherwise, and the Saints are by no means out of the race yet, even with a loss Sunday. But that would put them at 0-2 in the division and in a big hole for a team that right now has no clear-cut strengths on which to hang their hats.

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm