Tom Brady Holding His Historic Draft Card for the First Time is an All Time Moment

So how did Tom Brady’s weekend go? He turns 42. Finds out Josh Gordon has applied for reinstatement. Signs a contract extension that not only gives him two more years in New England and pays him $8 million this year, in the diabolical accounting of the NFL cap, frees up $5 million the team can use to surround him with more quality talent. And he got to go on a field trip to the place he will spend eternity, Football Valhalla.

And the part that has everyone with an emotional attachment to the Patriots feeling feelings is him holding his legendary draft card in his mighty hands. The most famous artifact in NFL Draft history held between the non-throwing hand fingers of the man who made it so. I wasn’t even ther and it’s got me all tingly in my bathing suit area. What’s it like for Brady? I can only imagine. But the closest parallel I can come up with is that it has to feel like when Clark Kent held the crystal that formed the Fortress of Solitude and found about his true nature:

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I’ve had a couple of people reach out to me to ask what player they lost that resulted in the Compensatory Pick that became Tom Brady. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing. Due the arcane nature of the compensatory system that is understood by no living human, we’ll never know. It’s a formula that takes into account every player a team loses and every player a team signs, so there is no direct line from a 1998 Patriot to Brady. All we do know is they lost P Tom Tupa, C Dave Wohlabaugh, DT Mark Wheeler and LB Todd Collins and were awarded picks 127, 199, 201 and 239.

Most importantly, when that 199th pick came up and they were debating taking Brady, Stanford’s Todd Husak or Tim Rattay out of Lousiana Tech, Quarterbacks Coach Dick Rehbein proverbially stood on the metaphoric desk and insisted on Brady. Then during training camp in 2001 he suffered a fatal coronary, but has always received full credit for the selection in one of those real world examples of the old adage, “It’s amazing what a group can accomplish when no one cares who gets the credit.”

So now hopefully that draft card is back in it’s hermetically-sealed case to be preserved forever like a great work of art or the Declaration of Independence. And no one will handle it again so that Brady’s prints remain the only one’s on it for posterity.

P.S. I’m not so much worried about his 2017 MVP uniform. The Pats didn’t win the Super Bowl that year and besides, with his new contract he’ll probably win two or three more of them.