Tom Brady is proof that picking future stars of NFL is no exact science

"I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine."

That quote, from the 2014 film The Imitation Game, about genius mathematician Alan Turing, can also be applied to predicting who will be the NFL's biggest stars.

The Super Bowl takes place this Sunday between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles in the wake of the retirement of the game's most decorated player, Tom Brady. Yet opinions of Brady as a 45-year-old seven-time Super Bowl champion differ greatly from those at the time of his unheralded arrival in the league.

Brady was the 199th player chosen in the 2000 NFL Draft, passed over multiple times by every team in the league. That was due to his limited playing time for his college team Michigan and lack of athletic ability, but it is the ultimate example of how hard it can be to predict sporting potential.

The science of forecasting which NFL prospects will flourish at the top level has advanced massively during Brady's long career, with analysts producing tomes packed with intricate details about players' physical and mental attributes. Data scientists have invented metrics such as SPARQ and RAS to measure their athletic ability while scouts dive deep into their backgrounds for any hint of character flaws. And still the list of players who were meant to be great who flop and the unpolished gems who rise to greatness grows.

Brady was selected 199th, but there's already an even less likely quarterback in the NFL Hall of Fame as no team was interested in former Rams QB Kurt Warner, who went undrafted in 1994 but won the Super Bowl in 2000. At the other end of the scale is JaMarcus Russell, taken with the first overall pick in 2007 by the Raiders, but who was out of the league after starting just 25 games in three seasons.

The quarterbacks in Sunday's game will also have chips on their shoulder about the opinions of them before they played their first NFL games. Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is one of the most talented passers ever seen and will be playing in his third Super Bowl at the age of 27. He was the tenth pick in 2017, with most of the teams who passed him over regretting that decision now. At the time, draft profiles of Mahomes said he: "has developed bad habits", "can be reckless" and "has mechanical issues to fix".

That's nothing, though, compared to the horror of some Eagles fans when Sunday's starting QB Hurts was drafted two years ago. The move was graded as an F and he was labelled a "back-up at best". Grown men were filmed screaming their disgust at Eagles executives. 

The scouting community got another F this year for allowing QB Brock Purdy to fall to the very last pick in the 2022 draft, as he was able to lead the San Francisco 49ers to the brink of the Super Bowl looking rather like the next Tom Brady. 

Our own football chiefs can't look too smugly at their American counterparts, though, as for every can't-miss prodigy such as Wayne Rooney or Jude Bellingham, there are many more highly-touted prospects who never make it - the infamous newspaper England Team of the Future projection for World Cups seven years later tend to comprise largely players who never go on to sniff an England cap.

Bryce Young of Alabama is odds-on to be the first pick in this year's draft and betting on which of he and fellow top QB prospects CJ Young and Will Levis will be selected first certainly seems a safer move than trying to predict which one will go on to have the best career. 

For now, we can just be happy that Mahomes and Hurts have been capable of doing the things no one could imagine of them and hope they put on a great show on Sunday.

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