They don't make men like Ray Akins anymore.

That's what Saints quarterback Drew Brees said Wednesday of his grandfather, who died a day earlier at the age of 92.

Akins was a former Marine and World War II veteran before becoming a legendary high school football coach in Texas. Akins coached at Gregory-Portland High School in Southern Texas from 1965-1988. He was the second-winningest coach in Texas high school football history when he retired in 1988, with 293 wins, and set a state record with 12 straight district titles.

"He was probably one of the most incredible people, incredible men that you could ever meet," Brees told reporters Wednesday. "They just do not make them like that anymore, honestly. He was 92 years old. He lived an incredible life. He taught me so much about life, about respecting others, caring for others, about discipline, and about hard work.

"Obviously, he was a football coach for 38 years so there was plenty of ball being coached along the way, but more so than that just spending time with him. Watching him and my grandmother, they modeled us for what a relationship and marriage should look like. They were married for 67 years and that is pretty remarkable. A guy who grew up from very humble means in Brady, Texas, which if you look at a map of Texas is in the dead center of Texas."

Brees, who will lead the Saints (11-4) against the Buccaneers (4-11) on Sunday with a chance to clinch the NFC South, said his great-grandfather was a "straw boss or basically like a sharecropper on a big property" and his grandfather "grew up in a house with basically a dirt floor, no running water, no electricity."

"He’d have to take the mules to the well to go get water maybe once a week," Brees added. "You basically had to hunt, kill, and grow whatever you ate. He rode a horse to school. So when people have this impression of what Texas is and what it is like, that was my grandpa. He rode a horse to school.

"When he turned 18 years old and graduated from high school, he took a train down to San Antonio with some other boys from his high school and they enlisted in the Marine Corps. There were about 100 guys there when they got there and ran through a battery series of physiological and psychological tests, and they only choose ten of them. They said, 'You ten have qualified to have the opportunity to be a Marine and go serve your country.'

"He took a train over to San Diego, went through Marines boot camp, shipped over to Guadalcanal for more training, and was there for the invasion of Okinawa, Japan on April 1, 1st Marine Division, 1st Battalion, 1st Regiment, Special Weapons Company," Brees continued. "What he endured over there, I heard a lot about that over the years from him. He was very proud of being a Marine. That was something he took so much pride in and while it was hard to talk about the war for a long time, I think he reached a point where he felt like there were so many lessons from it and it was a way to honor the guys that he served with to. He had 153 men in his Special Weapons Company and was one of three to survive. That just tells you how brutal that fighting was over there.

"The fact that he made it back and went on to become a football coach (was impressive), he actually played college football at Southwest Texas University from 1946 to 1950. He had the opportunity to go play center for the Chicago Bears in 1950. They were going to pay him $500 a month so he was going to make $6,000 a year. Instead of that he decided to go become the athletic director of a 1A high school in South Texas where he was going to be the head football coach and athletic director.

"Times have changed a little bit, but that was the start of his coaching career. He was a coach, athletic director, and a teacher for 38 years. He retired in 1988 in New Baden, Texas to his property that he bought out there in 1960, where he basically did all the work on that land. He had about 100 head of cattle. That’s what he loved, he loved being out there, working on fences, and feeding the cows, and checking on the heifers, and doing all that stuff. That’s the stuff I got to do with him as well, me and brother, and the rest of my family. Lots of good times, lots of good moments. He came to watch a lot of football games. He was an incredible man, I have a ton of memories, and his legacy will live on forever in his family. Those are all the things I want to instill in my kids too