I know that you’re not denigrating Brady. My issue is the reasoning around this hypothetical stuff. Your take is better than most of them, but I still strongly disagree with the thought process.
Brady went to Michigan, and after moving up the depth chart by his junior year, suddenly freshman Drew Henson, the #1 QB prospect in the country, became the 1A starter breathing down Brady’s neck; boosters pressured Carr to play Henson. Brady platooned both seasons despite being much better than Henson. That was cited as a major reason Brady dropped in the draft.
It would be easy to play the what-if game right here. If Henson chooses any other school, Brady is a much higher rated prospect.
But it doesn’t stop there. He gets drafted into the NFL in the late rounds, mainly due to the unlucky Henson situation, to a team that already has three quarterbacks, including a consensus top-5 franchise icon, and should he get a chance, he’s going to have to lead an offense with no pro bowl talent. The team was 5-13 and averaged 17 ppg in the games he was on the sidelines as a backup.
This is why the what-if game with Brady is absurd. He was dealt such a bad hand as it was, and he came out of it as the winner. So shifting to “What if he was drafted by the Colts or Eagles or Browns” seems to greatly miss the point. He was already in one of the most against-all-odds scenarios possible.
Between Henson sinking his draft value and then being drafted into what amounts to a worst case scenario due to the Patriots QB situation, the idea of theoretically raising the bar even higher seems like a bizarre idea.
Brady was going to make it. He wasn’t lucky. Inches didn’t decide this. It was going to happen. The only questions were when, where and how. We know this is hindsight, and that’s fine. Brady is one of the biggest outliers in sports history. His determination, confidence, and relentlessness is almost impossible to describe. He was always going to be great.