Playmakers

TOM BRADY PROVES THE DRAFT IS AN INEXACT SCIENCE

FOR ALL THE time and money and effort and anxiety devoted to determining the selection of incoming players by NFL teams, the process remains a crapshoot. The best proof of that comes not from the many high-profile busts but from the fact that the greatest quarterback of all time, and arguably the greatest player at any position of all time, fell all the way to round six, selection No. 199, in 2000.

Anyone who has paid any attention to the NFL over the past two decades knows that Tom Brady entered the league amid hardly any fanfare. A poor performance at the Scouting Combine, where he stood for a legendary photo that looks less like a future Hall of Famer and more like a middle-aged dad who had stumbled out of bed with a raging prostate, didn’t help matters. Indeed, it’s not as if the Patriots knew that they’d eventually pilfer an all-time great in the penultimate round of the draft. If they’d known who and what Brady would become, he would have been selected before their other draftees, such as Antwan Harris (round six), Jeff Marriott (five), Dave Stachelski (five), Greg Randall (four), J. R. Redmond (three), and Adrian Klemm (two).

Some have tried to say publicly that they knew what Brady would be. Hall of Fame Bills, Panthers, and Colts general manager (GM) Bill Polian, for example, has insisted that he had a first-round grade on Brady. Fine, so why not draft Brady before round six, keep him for a year or two as a Peyton Manning insurance policy, and then trade him? Privately, former Ravens offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh stood on the table for Brady to come to Baltimore—but former Ravens head coach Brian Billick ignored Cavanaugh. While the Ravens won a Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer that year, the ill-fated Elvis Grbac experiment happened in 2001, and the Ravens drifted at the position until they used a first-round pick on Joe Flacco the year after Billick was fired.

Brady’s case (beyond a level of confidence and a superhuman work ethic that didn’t register and likely didn’t exist when teams sifted through prospects in 2000) was ultimately aided by the fact that new coach Bill Belichick wanted to pivot from Drew Bledsoe, the team’s franchise quarterback, who had recently signed a market-setting nine-figure contract, in the hopes of finding someone who would consume less cap space and attention. Belichick found it in Brady, who for years took less money than he could have gotten, even long after he had supplanted Bledsoe as the face of the team and anyone/everyone else as the face of the NFL.

Many think Brady did it because he wanted to ensure that the Patriots always had sufficient cash and salary cap space to afford a roster full of competent starters and, more importantly, accomplished backups not consisting of low-level free agents who would be paid, and who would perform, accordingly. The truth, as told by multiple people with a thorough understanding of the dynamics in New England, resides elsewhere. Brady never wanted Belichick to feel compelled to get rid of him, so he never wanted to have the kind of salary-cap commitment that would cause Belichick to make an objective, dispassionate assessment of the roster and decide that the time had come to look elsewhere for a quarterback.

Whatever the dynamic, it worked. For two decades, it worked. And it delivered nearly perennial playoff appearances (they made it every year from 2001 through 2019 with the exception of 2002 and 2008, when Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury in Week One), nine Super Bowl appearances, and six NFL championships.

It all started because every team—including the Patriots—repeatedly overlooked the fact that the player who would go on to become the GOAT sat in plain sight, while six other quarterbacks (Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger, and Spergon Wynn) exited the draft board. Look at those names again. While Pennington and Bulger had decent careers, they don’t even begin to mimic Brady. As for the other four, their NFL careers will be remembered for only one thing: a team needed a quarterback, and the team drafted one of them instead of Brady.

And so, as the hype and the pomp and the circumstance unfold in every given April, as the NFL uses the draft as a vehicle for selling plausible hope to every fan of every team that every pick can become a player who will change the franchise for years to come, well, that’s accurate. The problem continues to be that those franchise saviors won’t necessarily come from the first thirty-two names called. Or the next thirty-two. Or the thirty-two after that. Lurking at the bottom of the process could be a player about whom no one is talking and in whom no one has a high degree of faith.

The fact that a player like that could become one of the best players of all time proves conclusively that no one knows whether any of these players will thrive at the next level and that no one will know until they get there and start playing against NFL-caliber competition. For every Brady, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of guys who aren’t. The fact that a Tom Brady became buried so deep in the process shows that ultimately no one really knows what they’re getting when it’s time to put names on draft cards.

AT ITS CORE, THE DRAFT IS ANTI-AMERICAN

I DON’T LIKE the draft. Yep. I said it. I’ll say it again.

I don’t like the draft. I’ve come to hate the draft.

I’m supposed to like the draft since I make my living covering all things football, including the process for selecting incoming players and the incessant February-to-April run-up to it. Actually, I’m supposed to love the draft. Sure, it’s fun to watch round one play out. And covering how round one will unfold in the weeks, days, and hours before the draft has helped pay the bills for years.

I still don’t like it.

I don’t like the draft because young men embarking on their professional careers in any industry should have the right to choose where they will work, for whom they will work, and with whom they will work. In nearly every industry, the new wave of workers has that ability. When picking their colleges, football players have that ability. When it comes to professional football (and all pro sports, for that matter), the league always has utilized, and always will utilize, a process of allowing various independent companies to call dibs.

Despite the inherently American characteristics of sports leagues such as the NFL, the draft reflects anti-American values. It restrains movement and flexibility and the inherent realities of self-determination. It forces men not long removed from being boys to move to places they otherwise would never choose to live, often hundreds if not thousands of miles from the places they’d prefer to start their professional lives for any and all possible reasons.

The NFL nevertheless has crafted over the years a sense that it’s a privilege to be told where your playing career will begin. That it’s an honor to get a phone call from one of thirty-two teams and to have your name announced from a podium in whichever NFL city is hosting the draft that year. That it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, to be whisked away to a place where you would never reside and perhaps never even visit.

For most players, submission becomes necessary because the process provides no alternative. Rarely, and not nearly often enough, a player forces a different path by making it clear that he doesn’t want to play for the team that plans to draft him. The examples, however, can be counted on two fingers: John Elway in 1983 and, most recently, Eli Manning in 2004.

Both made a power play, and for both, it worked. It happens so rarely because it invites widespread criticism from fans, who have become even more conditioned than the players to accepting that the movement of the pawns on the chessboard is never controlled by the individual pieces.

For Manning, it helped to have a father who had played in the NFL and who was willing to take the flak on his youngest son’s behalf. When Archie, who had been drafted to a bad Saints team and therefore had never enjoyed the success his skills deserved, made it clear that Eli had no desire to play for the then San Diego Chargers, the Chargers eventually blinked. The truth was that Eli had visited the Chargers and sensed that the mortal enemies who ran the team—GM A.J. Smith and coach Marty Schottenheimer—didn’t agree on whether they wanted to pick Eli. He sensed that Smith did and Schottenheimer didn’t, so he found a way to take a stand.

The fact that no one has tried to do it since Eli Manning shows how hard it is to buck the system. (In early 2020, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow definitely considered the possibility. As one person with knowledge of the situation explained it, “If Joe was from Athens, Georgia, and not Athens, Ohio, he would have refused to play in Cincinnati.”) Not long before Eli, former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett tried to disrupt the draft not by fighting it directly but by attacking the artificial barrier to entry, a mandatory three-year waiting period after high school graduation, arguing that this makes college football a de facto minor-league system for which the players don’t get paid.

Clarett, who had been suspended by Ohio State for all of the 2003 season for receiving benefits beyond room, board, and tuition, sued the NFL for early entry to pro football through the 2004 draft. At the federal district court level, he won. At the appeals court level, he lost. Along the way, the NFL and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) formalized the three-year rule, strengthening the perception/reality that anyone who wants to play pro football must simply accept that he will play wherever he’s drafted to play.

The many who blindly support the status quo say that any other system would allow NFL teams to stock their rosters with talent, rounding up all the best new players and skewing the balance of power. This argument ignores the fact that great players won’t choose a team that will not give them a clear path to the starting lineup. Likewise, a hard salary cap for rookies, with the worst teams having more money than the best teams to sign college players, would equalize the playing field by allowing them to lure the best rookies by offering them better financial packages.

Those counterarguments fall on deaf ears as the draft becomes increasingly popular. The NFL will never abandon one of its primary offseason tent-pole events, and with only one player or so per generation becoming the aberration, the average football fan will never take a step back, stand in the shoes of a twenty-one-year-old who deserves options, and realize that the entire system contradicts the basic principles on which America was founded.

Even though it most definitely does.

THE DRAFT IS THE SAFEST PLACE TO FIND A FRANCHISE QUARTERBACK

THE NFL HAS three types of teams: those with a franchise quarterback, those desperately looking for a franchise quarterback, and those with a quarterback who may (or may not) become a franchise quarterback. For those teams hoping to find a franchise quarterback, the draft represents the best option for obtaining one.

Even though the draft has been, is, and always will be a crapshoot, every season of college football creates a new crop of high-level talent who emerge as consensus candidates for franchise quarterbacks. Over the span of a quarter century, the Pittsburgh Steelers learned this lesson both the easy way and the hard way.

In 1970, Terry Bradshaw arrived from Louisiana Tech as the first overall pick in the draft. Although it took him a while to find his footing (and to fend off the likes of Terry Hanratty and Joe Gilliam), Bradshaw eventually led the Steelers to four Super Bowl wins en route to the Hall of Fame.

Thirteen years after drafting Bradshaw, the Steelers had an opportunity to land Pittsburgh native Dan Marino, who plummeted to the bottom of the first round amid a haze of rumors that (insert gasp) he enjoyed partying, possibly with certain substances that enhanced the party experience. The Steelers, as those who know the story tell it, opted not to create an awkward transition year or two from Bradshaw to Marino. So Marino landed in Miami, and then Bradshaw suffered a career-ending injury later that season.

Over the next twenty years, the Steelers had a revolving door of so-so quarterbacks, never going all in for a franchise guy. Sure, players like Neil O’Donnell and Kordell Stewart had their moments, but neither became franchise quarterbacks.

To their credit (but for draft purposes to their detriment), the Steelers rarely bottomed out in the standings and, conversely, rarely climbed to the top of the draft order. A 5–11 record in 1988 gave the Steelers the seventh overall pick the next year, but after top pick Troy Aikman (drafted by the Cowboys), the 1989 draft had no potential franchise quarterbacks. In 1999, a 6–10 mark again put the Steelers at No. 7; however, they selected receiver Plaxico Burress, passing on the only first-round quarterback taken that year (Chad Pennington, who never became a true franchise quarterback) and ultimately selecting Tee Martin one round before Tom Brady landed in New England. (It’s not as bad as when the Steelers cut Johnny Unitas in the 1950s, but it’s close.)

Then came 2004. A 6–10 season put the Steelers in the eleventh spot in a draft that had three highly regarded quarterbacks. The Chargers took Eli Manning, over his objection, and then traded him to the Giants, who had taken Philip Rivers with the intention of sending him to San Diego.

The third high-level prospect, Ben Roethlisberger from Miami (Ohio), remained on the board. And the slide began. At No. 5, Washington opted for safety Sean Taylor. (Washington had drafted quarterback Patrick Ramsey in the first round two years earlier.) At No. 6, the Browns went with tight end Kellen Winslow II. (Cleveland had the prior month given Jeff Garcia a four-year, $25 million deal to supplant 1999 first overall pick Tim Couch.) The Lions at No. 7 had taken Joey Harrington a year earlier with a top-three pick, the Falcons at No. 8 had Mike Vick, the Jaguars at No. 9 had selected Byron Leftwich a year earlier, and the Texans at No. 10 had made David Carr the first overall pick in 2002.

The Steelers pounced on the man known as Big Ben. (As it turned out, only the Steelers had brought Roethlisberger to town for a predraft visit.) It paid off. An injury to Tommy Maddox thrust Roethlisberger into the starting lineup in September. The Steelers won fifteen of sixteen games and made it to the brink of the Super Bowl that season. They won it the next year, they won it in 2008, they returned in 2010 (losing to the Packers), and they generally benefited from the presence of a franchise quarterback for a full generation.

Again, taking a top quarterback prospect high in the draft doesn’t guarantee the arrival of a franchise quarterback. However, with the 2011 rookie wage scale dramatically reducing the financial investment associated with top-ten picks, a team that lands near the top of the draft and needs a franchise quarterback should roll the dice. If it doesn’t work, that team will return to the top of the draft soon enough, and it can then roll the dice for another franchise quarterback.

The importance of the position more than justifies the risk. The potential longevity of a franchise quarterback makes it even more worthwhile, especially as quarterbacks increasingly play deep into their thirties and now into their forties, a dynamic that previously applied only to kickers.

Thus, the lesson for every team that needs a franchise quarterback becomes clear: hope to land near the top of the draft, and then take one of the best quarterbacks available. And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try (and if necessary try) again. Every year, another crop of potential franchise quarterbacks comes to the NFL. Every year, that quarterback taken in the upper portion of round one could become the answer at the position for up to two decades.

THE PREDRAFT PROCESS FOCUSES ON ALL THE WRONG THINGS

BY THE TIME the latest wave of players graduates to the NFL after three, four, or five years of college football, the thirty-two franchises have exactly what they need to assess the players. Specifically, they have anywhere from one to four years of game film.