Tom Brady became the winningest quarterback in NFL history on Sunday with a win over the Jets, passing Peyton Manning with his 187th career victory. "QB Wins" is a dumb stat, but we'll make an exception because Brady is pretty good. 

Brady's legacy is made better too by the fact that, and stop me if you've heard this before, he was taken with the 199th selection in the 2000 NFL Draft. No one really wanted the greatest quarterback of all time when he came out of college. Hindsight tells us otherwise, though, in a very convenient fashion.

Former Colts GM Bill Polian talks frequently about his first-round grade on Brady and now the Giants can be added to the list, as a group of former Giants personnel men told Ian O'Connor of ESPN that one scout was pounding the table for Brady back in the day. 

That scout, Whitey Walsh (which is just an incredible football scout name, by the way), was assigned to go watch Michigan when Brady was a senior. Brady wasn't on his list of guys to check out -- starting quarterback Drew Henson was -- but Walsh had a policy in place about scoping out seniors on the team regardless.

"But I always thought you should look at any senior who is starting; maybe they have something," Walsh told O'Connor. "You watch four, five, six plays, and if they don't show anything you leave them off the list. I watched Brady, and he was actually pretty good. He was very careful with his passes, very accurate, no interceptions. I wondered if his arm would be strong enough. If you saw him -- and he was listed that day at 6-foot-5, 195 pounds -- he didn't look good. He looked kind of emaciated, with no muscle definition."

Walsh would go back to see another Michigan game and this time be impressed enough with Brady to "add him to the list." 

"I put him on the list, and figured, it can't hurt. Let's give him a grade and at least we can talk about him," Walsh recalled. "Turns out nobody else [with the Giants] had his name down. I gave Brady a middle-to-late-round grade, and when I was in the draft room I guess I got drowned out. Whoever heard of Tom Brady?"

As it turns out, no one had heard of Brady. Or people had, but no one was clamoring to draft him. Even the Patriots passed on him six times, including once 12 picks before Brady was actually selected. It is the ultimate evidence for the NFL Draft being a complete and total crapshoot. 

But this is not some in-passing tale of a scout who loved Brady and didn't try to say anything during the draft. The Giants GM at the time, Ernie Accorsi, said Walsh was "very forceful" and "fought hard" to draft Brady in the middle-to-late rounds.

"He didn't just bring it up," Accorsi said. "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."

The NFL is kind of dumb when it comes to the draft and it's just a fact of life in the league. Mistakes get made every year, massive ones that cost people their jobs and end up making media members and front office folks look foolish. 

The Brady one will probably go down as the biggest mistake, even if there were some people trying to stop it from happening. Fortunately for the Giants, they made up for it by drafting Eli Manning four years later. Manning might not have the same number of titles as Brady does, but he did pick up a pair for the Giants at Brady's expense. That's a pretty decent little consolation prize.