Tom Brady Was Drafted By The Patriots In 2000 With The Help Of A Secret List The NFL Keeps

Many people forget, or never even realized, that future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady was a “compensatory” draft pick when he was taken in the 2000 NFL Draft by the New England Patriots.

That’s right. Not only did the Patriots get unbelievably lucky when they chose Tom Brady with the 199th overall pick in the sixth round of the draft, it wasn’t even a pick they would have had if not for their punter Tom Tupa signing with the New York Jets in free agency.

So how exactly did this happen?

Every season during the NFL Draft, teams are allowed to select players with additional picks they received because of “compensatory” free agents signing with another team. Tom Tupa was one of those compensatory free agents that year.

According to the NFL, “Compensatory free agents are determined by a formula based on salary, playing time and postseason honors. The formula was developed by the NFL Management Council. Not every free agent lost or signed by a club is covered by this formula. Clubs that suffer a net loss of CFAs during the prior free agent signing period are eligible to receive a corresponding number of compensatory selections.”

So what is this magic formula the NFL uses to determine the value of a free agent, and in turn, what compensatory picks teams are awarded? No one really knows.

We do know that a player has to be “ranked within the top 35% of all League players” in order to be considered a compensatory free agent.

But again, who makes that determination?

Sportswriter and podcast host Pablo Torre addressed this question a few days ago on his show.

“We should recognize how the Patriots acquired pick number 199 in the first place,” Torre said. “Because how this decision really came to be, it turns out, is an active mystery. It is a mystery involving another decision and another player and a suspiciously secret rabbit hole of a system. A system that has denied and infuriated the smartest analysts and most plugged in executives all around the NFL.”

Pablo Torre would go on talk to an NFL executive that wished to remain anonymous who revealed, “There are probably no teams that have clarity or certainty about who’s going to receive a pick and where the picks are going to be until the picks are announced.”

Torre continued to explain, “The NFL office, the way they actually assign these picks, these cost controlled Christmas gifts behind closed doors, it’s mind-blowing in a different way because what the NFL office does, it turns out, is quietly keeping and updating an enormous master list of every player in the league. We’re talking offense. We’re talking defense. We’re talking special teams. All the positions, all of whom get combined into this one master list. And they rank all of these players from most valuable to least valuable in order. The rub, as you might imagine, is that this list is completely confidential. Like, it’s the fantasy football big board of God himself.”

The anonymous NFL explained it this way: “The picks are roughly determined by stacking every player in the National Football League from most highly-paid to least, and there’s a points system that correlates to those tiers. Players can achieve extra points based on how much they play and different types of honors they receive at the end of the season.”

So, no one really knows how these compensatory picks are handed out. Did the NFL know something that everyone else didn’t when they gave New England that 199th pick in the 2000 NFL Draft? It seems pretty unlikely. Then again, perhaps the entire Tom Brady story was all just part of the NFL’s ongoing script.