Sports are stupid. Objectively, through a clear lense, grown men being paid astronomical amounts of money to play a child's game while nurses and teachers apply for financial aid, it's hard not to resent professional sports and the millionaires who play them sometimes. But beyond the bloated egos of self-important 20-something's and a shady history of covering up brain damage, there's a beautiful story in each sport.
It's about the unstoppable force and the immovable object. It's about the 14 point underdog and the backup quarterback mounting an impossible comeback. The human condition, overcoming all the odds and refusing to conform or buckle in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. There are so many examples of this throughout history. Kurt Warner bagged groceries before he won a Super Bowl, Buster Douglas was a nobody before he knocked out Mike Tyson, and the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team made us believe in miracles.
What if I told you that the best example of this happened in the last thirty years and you didn't even notice? In fact, what if I told you that you not only rolled your eyes at arguably the biggest underdog in the history of American sports, but that you actively rooted against him?
The Best Story the NFL Ever Told Happened in Primetime and You Didn't Even Notice
What you're about to read is the story about a quarterback named Edward Patrick. I want you to imagine the most generic backup quarterback that you can. Tall, unathletic, kinda goofy looking, not necessarily ugly, but not the cover of GQ either. He's football-savvy, throws a catchable ball, and breezes through his progressions, but he's skinny-fat, ran an awkward 5.24 40 yard dash, and won't wow anyone with his arm. Most experts agree that he's a mid-to-late round pick, and honestly, he's lucky to have gotten this far.
Even before he got to college, nobody would've confused this gangly mess for a professional athlete. He didn't touch a football until he was a junior in high school, where he rode the bench on a winless team that failed to score a single touchdown. By the time he became the team's undisputed starter, the scouts had come and gone, and he recieved no more than three collegiate offers.
Even when he got to college, he hardly impressed. When he arrived at his school, there were six quarterbacks ahead of him on the depth chart, including the team's incumbent starter, as well as the redshirted son of a Hall of Fame, Super Bowl winning quarterback. Eddy would have his fair share of struggles with second generation quarterbacks during his career.
Eddy toiled and toiled, but no matter how hard he tried, the coaches just didn't take him seriously. At one point, his head coach said the starting quarterback job was up for grabs, and it was between the incumbent and the son of a legend. All his hard work, pointless. He considers transferring. He considers giving football up altogether.
One day, he marched into his office and tells his coach that he's quitting. He's not getting a fair shake, nobody's giving him a chance, and he just wants to go home. The coach thinks it over, tells Eddy that he'll honor his request, but asks that he sleep on it first. Eddy agonized over the decision, toiling over it in his mind, and barely slept a wink.
The next day, Eddy marched back into his coach's office, leaned over the desk, looked his coach in the eye and said, "I'm going to stay, and I'm going to prove to you that I'm a great quarterback." From there, he never looked back. He didn't think about what was fair or what was earned, he developed a new mantra. From that day forward, he would simply do his job.
Eventually, the mantra paid off, and during his junior year, he became the starter. But his struggles weren't done yet, during his senior year, when the coach finally named him the starter, he had to split snaps with an underclassmen, a budding superstar with multi-sport appeal, the quarterback's answer to Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson. Eventually, Eddy's natural leadership ability and proclivity for last-second heroics earned him the starting job.
Welcome to the NFL, Rookie
Now it's draft day and he's watching the names get called on television, sitting next to a phone doing a spot-on impression of a watched pot. Quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, tight ends, offensive linemen, defensive linemen, linebackers, corners, safeties, and even a kicker go off the board, and as day one of the NFL draft ends, he goes for a walk with his parents, who support him as he experiences something hundreds of NFL hopefuls do every year, the dusk on a day that never really started.
Eventually, his phone does ring. A team uses a compensatory pick to bring him to their team. That's the good news. The bad news? The team already has a franchise quarterback, and they just signed him to a lucrative, long-term deal. When Eddy arrives on the team, he's the fourth string quarterback, a death sentence for young quarterbacks. In a league where every player matters, most team's only keep two quarterbacks, three on rare occasions.
Eddy tries his best in training camp, but he doesn't make a great impression. His head coach laments that the high schooler down the street could make the throws he can't quite connect on, and Mr. Patrick is reminded that it wasn't long ago that he sat on the sideline while his winless JV team failed to find the endzone for an entire season.
However, doom and gloom aside, the coach sees something in Eddy and realizes that if he's designated to the practice squad, he won't stay there long. In an act of prudent self-preservation, Eddy Patrick stays on as the team's fourth quarterback. As a sign of just how unprecedented this is, the only other time in this history of this franchise where they had four quarterbacks on the roster were years where nobody could stay healthy, and everyone started at least three games.
Eventually, Eddy did get to play. He had a couple of meaningless passes in a blowout loss, but he registered his first career completion. A dink for six yards. If that was all, we've already witnessed a better story than Rudy. The kid who couldn't get on the field for a winless JV team not only makes a NFL roster, but gets to throw a couple of passes? It warms the soul. But believe it or not, his story hasn't even started yet. Not the part that you know, anyway.
What Happens After Happily Ever After?
The next season, Eddy works even harder. He remembers his collegiate mantra, "do your job," he doesn't worry about anyway else, he just goes out and does his job. He does his job so well that he finds himself as the backup quarterback on his team. Then one day, destiny intervened. His starting quarterback exposed himself to the open field, and before Bill Polian re-wrote the rules to protect Peyton Manning, a quarterback in the open field was a dead man walking. A soul, if not bone-crushing hit on the sideline sent the quarterback to the hospital, giving Eddy his first moments of meaningful football on the NFL stage. From that moment until he retired, he was a starting quarterback in the National Football League.
Wasn't that a nice, feel good story?
I thought so.
That's why I felt compelled to write it out. To follow this kid from the winless Junipero Serra High School JV team to the University of Michigan to the New England Patriots, it's everything we love about sports. I just have one question.
I must know, how does it feel...
To root for Thomas Edward Patrick Brady?
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