FTW: Teams had no excuse for passing on Tom Brady

"We didn't open up his chest and look at his heart. We didn't look at that. I don't know if anybody did. What kind of spine he had. And resiliency, and all the things that are making him really great right now."

That's former 49ers coach Steve Mariucci explaining why Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in NFL history, fell to the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL draft. Ask any of the other coaches and general managers who passed on Brady and you'll get a similar response.

Nobody could've seen this coming.

It's a cop out. The kind of cop out that explains why teams, gifted with more information and scouting resources than ever before, are no better at evaluating quarterbacks now than they were 40 years ago.

If scouts had been looking for the right things, they'd have known Brady was going to be a good NFL quarterback.

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Ernie Accorsi is one of the best general managers in the history of professional sports. He's particularly adept at identifying good quarterback prospects. He drafted John Elway in Baltimore, Bernie Kosar in Cleveland and Eli Manning in New York.

He didn't draft Tom Brady, though.

Earlier this week, Accorsi revealed he ignored advice from a Giants scout to draft the skinny quarterback out of Michigan. Whitey Walsh, who was destined to be a football scout from the moment his parents named him Whitey Walsh, was that scout. He was assigned to scout Michigan for potential draft picks. Though Brady was not one of the players the Giants were really interested in, the fifth-year senior still managed to catch Walsh's eye.

Via ESPN.com:

"I watched Brady, and he was actually pretty good. He was very careful with his passes, very accurate, no interceptions. I wondered if his arm would be strong enough. If you saw him - and he was listed that day at 6-foot-5, 195 pounds - he didn't look good. He looked kind of emaciated, with no muscle definition."

"I put him on the list," the scout said, "and figured, it can't hurt. Let's give him a grade and at least we can talk about him. Turns out nobody else [with the Giants] had his name down. I gave Brady a middle-to-late-round grade, and when I was in the draft room I guess I got drowned out. Whoever heard of Tom Brady?"

And that's the problem. Nobody in the Giants draft room had ever heard of Tom Brady. He was never going to be a highly-touted prospect. Skinny kids with unspectacular arms don't grab the attention of scouts. It doesn't take work to find an Andrew Luck; you have to really be looking to find a Tom Brady. But it's not like the signs weren't there.

"Truly, the Brady story is one of the great mysteries of all time," said Accorsi. "It's not like he was playing at Augustana. He threw four touchdown passes in the Orange Bowl against Alabama. … We were all asleep."

How is that possible? How were scouts sleeping on a serial winner who was successful at one of college football's most prestigious schools? Was Brady's Michigan film really that underwhelming?

I wanted to figure that out, so I went back and watched a couple games from Brady's senior season - a come-from-behind win over Penn State and that Alabama game Accorsi mentioned - to see what those scouts who whiffed on Brady saw.

Here is my retroactive pre-draft scouting report on Brady, using the same criteria I used to evaluate the 2017 draft class of quarterbacks.

(Before I continue, I'll acknowledge that I have hindsight on my side. I already know what Brady becomes, so confirmation bias is certainly an issue here. I did, however, try my best to look for faults in Brady's game that may have scared scouts off.)

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The first thing that stands out about the Michigan senior is his fearlessness in the pocket. He OWNS the pocket. No matter how many bodies are around him, Brady's eyes never drop. He'll subtly sidestep the rush or calmly climb the pocket to buy himself time or find space to make throws.