New York Giants: Former GM Laments His Tom Brady Misfire

Ernie Accorsi is widely respected as one of the better GMs in recent years. His New York Giants run was probably his best work.

Granted he did a phenomenal job building the Cleveland Browns of the 1980s but the man reached his zenith in the late 1990s and 2000s with New York. He constructed both the 2000 team that reached the Super Bowl and then the 2007 team that shocked the world by upsetting the unbeaten New England Patriots. One could also say his fingerprints were still over the 2011 team that did the same thing four years later.

It’s why he was given a Super Bowl ring even though he retired after the 2006 season. That said, for all his success Accorsi has plenty of regrets. Most GMs do. However, his stings particularly hard. He talked with ESPN recently and the topic of Tom Brady came up. Accorsi began to explain a story about how one of his scouts in 2000 begged and pleaded with him to draft the Michigan quarterback.

Accorsi learned brutal lesson about listening to his people

"“Brady was so far off the Giants’ radar that when longtime scout Whitey Walsh, a longtime Giants scout, first went to Michigan to scout players, Brady wasn’t even on the list of players to look at. But Walsh took notice of Brady and loved him so much that he begged Accorsi to draft him. When the Giants drafted Brady’s Michigan teammate Dhani Jones with the 177th overall pick, Walsh was pounding the table in the draft room for Brady, who would ultimately go 199th to the Patriots.“He didn’t just bring it up,” Accorsi told Ian O’Connor of ESPN. “He was very forceful. Fought hard. No one listened. . . . It’s my fault that I didn’t act on his urging to draft Brady. Truly, the Brady story is one of the great mysteries of all time. It’s not like he was playing at Augustana. He threw four touchdown passes in the Orange Bowl against Alabama. . . . We were all asleep.”"

Accorsi shouldn’t feel too bad. Plenty of teams slept on Brady that year. The Patriots included. Everybody likes to given them credit for “discovering” him but the truth is they took a late round flier and got lucky. That’s often how it works in the draft. The Giants weren’t starved for quarterback help. They’d gone 7-9 the year before and had a former Pro Bowler Kerry Collins improving within their offense. He wound up going 12-4 that year and reaching the Super Bowl.

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Collins reached his second Pro Bowl two years later. So it’s not like Accorsi missed badly. At the same time he did learn a valuable lesson. If his scouts are not backing down in support of a player, it might be wise to listen. Odds are he received similar advice when he maneuvered to get Eli Manning four years later. It seems rather fitting that pick became the one that gave Brady the most pain in subsequent years.