Part 2
Marc Bulger, West Virginia — sixth round, No. 168 to the New Orleans Saints.
And then, at pick 199 in the sixth round, the New England Patriots drafted Tom Brady.
So — how many of those names do you actually remember?
Pennington, sure. He started for years with the Jets and the Dolphins and was genuinely good. Bulger, fair — he had a real run with the Rams and made a couple of Pro Bowls. Those two earned their careers.
But Carmazzi never took a regular-season snap in the NFL. Spergon Wynn got a handful of starts and was gone. Tee Martin won a national championship at Tennessee and never got his NFL career off the ground. Redman settled in as a career backup.
Six quarterbacks drafted before one. And the one turned out to be the greatest to ever play the position. The league watched it happen in real time and still couldn't explain it.
Here's the detail that gets me every single time, though.
Brady grew up in San Mateo. He was a 49ers kid. Joe Montana was his idol — the poster, the daydream, the whole thing. And in the 2000 NFL Draft, the San Francisco 49ers held the 65th pick and used it on a quarterback from Hofstra named Giovanni Carmazzi.
The franchise he grew up worshipping had the chance and took the other guy. Somewhere, a screenwriter read that and quietly put his pen down.
[[VIDEO]]
Ask Brady about the scouting report now and he doesn't do the athlete thing where he claims he never read it. He leans in.
"That kind of gets me fired up, because I'm thinking, you know what, the hell these people know? That sounds like Joe Montana right there."
That's not a throwaway line. He knew exactly what he was saying.
Montana's story is the same story. Notre Dame quarterback. Not a rocket arm. Not a physical freak. Real questions about whether his body would hold up. The 49ers finally took him in the third round of the 1979 NFL Draft — pick 82 overall.
What did he do with it? Four Super Bowls. Three Super Bowl MVPs. Two NFL MVPs. A gold jacket in Canton.
And a kid in San Mateo, watching Joe Cool work at Candlestick Park, absorbed the lesson that would define his entire life: the draft is a guess, and the guess is wrong all the time.
If you want the deep dive on this, ESPN's "The Brady 6" (2011) is built entirely around those six quarterbacks and the one nobody wanted. Gotham Chopra's "Man in the Arena" (2021, ESPN+) is the one for the psychology — ten episodes of a guy calmly explaining how he turned every slight into fuel. Different flavors of the same gospel.
But a bad draft report is just an insult. You can frame it. You can read it before every workout. What happened next in 2001 required something else entirely.
Back then, Brady was still a backup. Still the sixth-round pick, still the 199th name off the board. Still the guy holding a clipboard behind Drew Bledsoe — a franchise quarterback who had just signed a 10-year, $103 million contract.
And then Mo Lewis came off the edge, hit Bledsoe on the sideline, and the entire map of NFL history changed hands in about two seconds.
That's where we're going next — the 2001 season, the Super Bowl run, and the moment every line of that scouting report turned into a punchline.
You'd have passed on him too. So would I. That's the whole point.
From Fourth-String to First-Ballot: The Michigan Years and the Patriots Dynasty
The moment I need you to see isn't the snow in Foxborough. It's the Super Bowl XXXVI final drive. You're going to ask me why a sixth-round pick is even on the field with the game tied and the Rams' 'Greatest Show on Turf' waiting to break hearts. I get it. But watch Tom Brady in that huddle. He's 24. He's supposed to be a backup. He's supposed to be a clipboard guy. Instead, he's moving the Patriots into field-goal range, and Adam Vinatieri is about to kick the ball through the night. 20-17. Game over. Brady is Super Bowl MVP. And you're left asking: how did we get here? That's the part nobody saw coming.
Go back to Michigan. Brady wasn't the starter until his junior year. You're going to ask: why? Because he shared time with Drew Henson, a five-star recruit with a rocket arm and a future so bright that people talked about him like he was the next John Elway. Brady was the other guy. The gangly kid. The one who looked like he'd never seen a weight room. And yet, when the Wolverines needed wins, Brady delivered. He led Michigan to victories over Ohio State and Alabama in the 2000 Orange Bowl. That's not a fluke. That's a pattern.
[[AD]]
Let's put some numbers on it. Brady finished his Michigan career with a 20-5 record as a starter. The 2000 Orange Bowl against Alabama? Michigan won 35-34 in overtime. Brady threw for 369 yards and four touchdowns. That's not a game manager. That's a guy who can sling it when it matters. But the scouts didn't see that. They saw the 5.28 40-yard dash. They saw the skinny frame. They saw the average arm. They saw a system quarterback.
