The Three Drews

I've wanted to write this one for over ten years, ever since I first watched The Brady 6. I started it a few times over the years and never finished. This time I finally did.

First, a little about me. I grew up a Bengals fan. If you know anything about the Bengals in the '90s, you know there wasn't a lot of hope. We had Jeff Blake and we had some others. LOL. I never left them, though, and I'm still a Bengals fan today.

I'm also an Ohio State fan. I was then and I still am.

So how did I end up a Patriots fan? In January 1997 the Patriots played the Packers in the Super Bowl. It felt like everybody was pulling for Green Bay. I didn't know a lot about either team, but I liked Drew Bledsoe, so I went with the Patriots. They lost, but I stuck with them. A few years later Bledsoe was the $100 million man and I was all in.

I did not like Tom Brady. I'll just say that up front. When Bledsoe went down in 2001, I was bummed. And as a Buckeyes fan I didn't pay any attention to Michigan, so I barely knew who this guy was.

Then Brady did something nobody expected. He proved everybody wrong, and he kept proving everybody wrong. So I started learning about him, and somewhere in there I started liking him. Now he's my favorite quarterback of all time.

If you haven't seen The Brady 6, go watch it. It's the ESPN documentary about the six quarterbacks who got drafted ahead of Brady in 2000: Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger and Spergon Wynn. Brady went 199th. Years later he still gets emotional talking about it.

What I noticed once I went back and learned his story is how many times Brady ran into a guy named Drew. At Michigan it was Drew Henson. In New England it was Drew Bledsoe, my guy. And for most of his career the guy right behind him in the record books was Drew Brees.

I'm not a sports writer. I just love this stuff and I like numbers, so I pulled the stats myself.

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Who was Drew Henson?

As a Buckeye, it pains me a little to write a whole section about Michigan. But this is where it starts, and I only learned most of it later.

If you watched college football in the late '90s, you probably knew Drew Henson's name before you knew Tom Brady's. He was the kid everybody wanted. Big arm, one of the top recruits in the country, and good enough at baseball that the Yankees drafted him in 1998. Michigan got him anyway.

Brady was already there, and nobody was too excited about him. At one point he was seventh on the depth chart. He saw a sports psychologist and thought about transferring to Cal. He stuck it out and won the job in 1998.

That 1998 season was all Brady. He threw for 2,427 yards and 14 touchdowns, set Michigan's records for attempts and completions in a season, and beat Arkansas in the Citrus Bowl. He also lost to Ohio State 31-16 that year, which I'm happy to point out. Henson was a freshman and mostly got mop-up time. He threw 45 passes all year.

You'd think that would settle it. It didn't.

The 1999 season

This is my favorite part of the whole story, even if it's about Michigan.

In 1999 Lloyd Carr split the job between them. The plan was Brady in the first quarter, Henson in the second, and then Carr would pick whoever he liked for the second half. Brady was a senior and a returning starter who had just won a bowl game, and he was still trying out for his own job every Saturday in front of over 100,000 people.

Here's how those first seven games went:

Carr said about them, "I like them both." I bet Brady loved hearing that.

After the Illinois game, that was it. Carr gave Brady the job, the whole game, every game. They lost that day, but Brady threw for over 300 yards.

They didn't lose again. Michigan won the last five. Brady threw the game winner at Penn State with 1:46 left. He beat Ohio State 24-17, and I'm not going to talk about that one. And in his last college game, the Orange Bowl against Alabama, he went 34 of 46 for 369 yards and 4 touchdowns and they won 35-34 in overtime. It was the first overtime game in Michigan history.

He finished 20-5 as a starter at Michigan.

How did they compare at Michigan?

So what happened to Henson? He finally got the job in 2000 after Brady left, and he was good. Then he walked away from football for a six-year, $17 million deal with the Yankees. He got 9 at-bats in the big leagues and 1 hit. He came back to football, went in the 6th round in 2003, and ended up in Dallas. His one NFL start was on Thanksgiving 2004 and he got pulled at halftime. His whole NFL career was 9 games, 98 yards, 1 touchdown and 1 interception.

Brady passed Henson at Michigan in 1999 and Henson never caught back up.

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Was Bledsoe just unlucky?

This one is personal for me. Bledsoe is the reason I'm a Patriots fan.

When Brady got to New England in 2000, Drew Bledsoe was the Patriots. First overall pick in 1993 out of Washington State. He took a team nobody cared about to that Super Bowl against the Packers. In March 2001 they gave him a 10-year, $103 million contract, the biggest in NFL history at the time.

Brady was the skinny fourth-string guy with the bad combine picture. Nobody thought he was taking that job. I sure didn't.

Then came September 23, 2001. Bledsoe ran for the sideline against the Jets and Mo Lewis hit him. It was a clean hit, but it tore a blood vessel in his chest and he was bleeding inside, about a pint an hour. He needed a chest tube and spent days in the hospital. That's not a "walk it off" injury. That one was scary.

Brady came in. He never gave the job back.

I didn't know this next part until I looked into it. In the AFC Championship that year in Pittsburgh, Brady hurt his ankle and Bledsoe came in off the bench. He went 10 of 21 for 102 yards, threw a touchdown to David Patten, and the Patriots won. Then Brady started the Super Bowl against the Rams and drove them down the field at the end for the Vinatieri kick. Bledsoe helped get the guy who took his job to the Super Bowl. I can't imagine how that felt.

The Patriots traded him to Buffalo after that season. He had some good years there and finished with 44,611 yards, 251 touchdowns and 4 Pro Bowls. That's a really good career and I don't want to take anything away from him. He was one of those quarterbacks from that era who just kept going.

When they played each other, though, Brady won 5 of 6. The only loss was a 31-0 game in the 2003 opener. Later that same year Brady won the rematch 31-0.

So yes, Bledsoe got hurt, and that's how the door opened. But Brady is the one who walked through it, and he stayed for 20 years.

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Wasn't Brees better?

First, I'll be honest. Brees is only in this because his name is Drew. He never competed with Brady for a job like Henson and Bledsoe did. And yes, I checked. There isn't a fourth Drew to add. Sorry, Drew Lock.

The way I see that era, you had a group of quarterbacks who just kept going year after year. Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Philip Rivers and I'm probably forgetting a few. Then you had a tier above them. Brady, Peyton Manning and Brees.

So Brees was never the guy Brady was competing with for a job. But he was the closest to Brady of the three Drews, and it isn't close.

In college he was better than Brady too. A lot better. At Purdue he threw for 11,792 yards and 90 touchdowns, won the Maxwell Award, was Big Ten MVP, finished third in the Heisman and took Purdue to the Rose Bowl.

They even played each other once in college. It was the Purdue game in 1999, right in the middle of the Henson mess. Michigan won 38-12 and Brady threw for 250 yards. The Michigan Daily's headline the next day was "Drew who? Brady shows up Brees." That headline could've been the title of this whole article.

Brees got overlooked too. People said he was too short, so he fell to the 32nd pick in 2001. In San Diego he tore up his throwing shoulder in the last game of 2005 and the Chargers went with Rivers. Miami looked at the shoulder and passed. New Orleans took him, and he became the face of a city that was rebuilding after Katrina.

He won a Super Bowl after the 2009 season and was MVP of that game.

What do Brady and Brees have in common?

More than I realized. They're number one and two all time in passing yards, Brady with 89,214 and Brees with 80,358. They both got passed over. They both played into their 40s. They traded the big passing records back and forth for years.

They even chased the same streak. Brees holds the record for the most games in a row with a touchdown pass, 54, from 2009 to 2012. Brady came close with 52.

And I was there when Brady's streak ended. His streak started against the Bengals in Week 1 of 2010, and it ended against the Bengals on October 6, 2013 in Cincinnati. It was a rainy one. The Bengals won 13-6 and Brady didn't throw a touchdown. I was rooting for both teams so much that I didn't know what to feel.

Fun fact: when Brees's 54-game streak ended, he started another one the very next week and went 45 more games.

Did Brees beat Brady?

This one surprised me. Yes. More often than Brady beat him.

Brees went 5-3. In 2020 he beat Brady twice, once 38-3. Then they met again in the playoffs in New Orleans and Brady won 30-20. Brees threw for 134 yards. It was the last game he ever played, and a few weeks later Brady won Super Bowl number seven.

Brees won more of the games. Brady won the one that counted.

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How do they stack up?

College

NFL

(Regular season passing stats.)

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What about fantasy?

This is the part I had the most fun with. I pulled these from my own stats setup, which has every NFL game back to 1999, so Bledsoe's first six years aren't in here. These are standard fantasy points.

Was Brees the better fantasy quarterback? Game for game, yes. He scored a little more per game, finished as the top QB twice, and his 2011 season is the best one on this whole list.

Brady wins on total. You don't get to almost 6,000 fantasy points without being on the field for over 20 years. His 2021 season in Tampa, 374.7 points and 43 touchdowns, is the second best of his career, and he was 44 years old. Most quarterbacks are done by 37.

He also put up 857 fantasy points in 48 playoff games. That's close to three extra seasons.

In our league, Brady was still getting rostered at the very end. Mixon It Up 2.0 had him in 2021, when he was going around pick 80 on ESPN. Lex Players had him in 2022, when he was going around pick 128.

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So why Brady?

I keep coming back to the same thing. He was never the most talented guy in the room.

Henson had the arm and the hype. Bledsoe was the number one pick with the giant contract. Brees had the better college career and might have been the more accurate passer. On paper Brady loses to one of them at every stop.

He won anyway. He waited behind Henson's hype and then behind Bledsoe's contract, and when his shot came he was ready. Then he played until he was 45. Twenty-three seasons, a Super Bowl at 43, and one of his best years at 44.

I think the draft never left him either. You can see it in The Brady 6. Splitting quarters with Henson in 1999, sitting behind Bledsoe, watching six quarterbacks go before him. He carried all of it.

I was a Bledsoe fan who didn't want anything to do with Tom Brady. He changed my mind the same way he changed everybody else's, by winning.

Three Drews. None of them caught him.