Tom Brady and the miracle of the late-round draft steal

Just how common is it?

If you know anything about pro football, you know this: Tom Brady, the greatest QB of all time, was a 6th round pick — and the 199th overall overall selection in the 2000 NFL Draft.

Brady was, largely, unremarkable at the University of Michigan. After being the starter during his junior year, head coach Lloyd Carr refused — until the very last second — to name him the starter for his senior year.

In 11 games that year, Brady threw for 2,217 yards and 16 touchdowns against 6 interceptions. Good! But certainly not great.

And his performance at the draft combine wasn’t, um, amazing either.

Like, you don’t watch this and think “That guy is going to be the greatest QB to ever walk the planet.”

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And yet, the Patriots liked him enough to pick him.

“It's not that we said we wanted to draft a tall, lanky quarterback that ran a 5.3 [time in the] 40 [yard dash]. Those weren't the traits we were looking for,” Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager and then-member of the Patriots personnel staff Jason Licht said in 2014. “But we were looking for the mental makeup ...[Bill] Belichick did a lot of homework on him, along with our staff, on his mental makeup. Watching the tape, he was the guy that would go in and lead [the University of Michigan] back to victory.”

And the legend of Tom Brady was born. Seven Super Bowls later, every team dreams of finding their own Brady-in-the-rough: The guy everyone overlooks — for one reason or another — but who has it in him to not just compete in the NFL but be a star.

With the first round of the NFL draft now over — and the second through seventh rounds coming over the next 48 hours — I wondered just how likely those dreams are to actually turn into reality.

After all, if it was easy to turn a 6th round draft pick into a massive super star, every team would do it!

This chart, by Anthony Reinhard, makes plain just how hard it is to find an all-Pro player — much less a generational star like Brady — in the later rounds.

As Reinhard notes on Twitter X of the data:

Here, I have the rate of players who had at least one all-pro season based on where they were taken in the 20 drafts from 2001 to 2020. % that ended up all-pros: - 1st round: 18% - Day 2: ~5% - Early Day 3: ~2% - Late Day 3: <1%

Even picking in the 1st round, you have less than a 1 in 5 chance of selecting an All-Pro. By the third round that number is just 4%.

So, no, there just aren’t a lot of Tom Bradys waiting out there. He is a one of one.

But, in researching this, I did get curious: Who are the other players selected in the later rounds of the draft — rounds 4-7 for the purposes of this discussion — who wound up starring (or something close to it) in the NFL?

Here are a few of I came up with. As always, let me know who I forgot or missed!

• Brock Purdy: Purdy, the Iowa State QB, was “Mr. Irrelevant,” the LAST pick of the 2022 draft — selected by the San Francisco 49ers as, seemingly, a one in a million shot. At the start of the 2022 season, Purdy was third on the QB depth chart behind starter Trey Lance and backup Jimmy Garapollo. Lance got hurt in the 3rd game of the season and was out for the year. Garapollo got injured in the 13th game. Purdy stepped in and started the final 5 games of the year. The team went 5-0. In 2023, as the starter, Purdy led the 49ers to the Super Bowl where they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs. Not bad for a first two years in the league.

  

• Shannon Sharpe: Sharpe, who played college ball at Savannah State University, wasn’t selected until the 7th round — pick 192 — by the Denver Broncos. The knock on Sharpe was that he was too big to play tight end in the NFL. Whoops! In 14 seasons, Sharpe caught 815 passes for 10,060 yards and 82 touchdowns. He was on three Super Bowl winning teams and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

  

• Richard Dent: The Chicago Bears defensive anchor was drafted in the 8th round — 203rd overall — of the 1983 NFL draft. Dent had played at little-heralded Tennessee State in college and was overlooked by most NFL teams. He became a starter in his second year in the league and piled up 17.5 sacks. He had 17 sacks the next year to lead the league. He ended his career with 137.5 sacks — good for 10th on the all-time list. Dent made the Hall of Fame in 2011.

  

• Dwight Clark: Clark was taken by the San Francisco 49ers in the 10th round, the 249th pick, of the 1979 draft. He had played college football at Clemson where his QB had been Steve Fuller, who was widely regarded as one of the best draft prospects that year. (He went 23rd overall to the Chiefs.) Bill Walsh, the 49ers coach, went to Clemson to see Fuller. But Fuller needed someone to throw to — and Clark was available. Voila! Clark played 9 seasons in the NFL and wound up with 506 receptions for 6,750 career yards. But he will ALWAYS be remembered for “The Catch” in the 1981 NFC championship game. (Worth noting: The guy who threw Clark the ball — Joe Montana — was taken with the 82nd overall pick in that same 1979 draft.)

  

• Richard Sherman: Coming out of Stanford, Sherman was not highly regarded as a cornerback. After getting beat by a receiver on a route in the Senior Bowl, then Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis told Sherman: “That’s why you’ll never f—ing make it in this league.” Sherman fell all the way to the 5th round where the Seattle Seahawks selected him with the 154th pick. Sherman went on to play 11 years in the NFL — making 5 Pro Bowls and being named 1st team All-Pro three times.