Uncovering the origins of the most famous photo in NFL history

Finding out where the Tom Brady combine photo came from and why it is the only embarrassing photo we’ve seen from the NFL combine. Our quest for the origins of this famous photo takes us all the way to the United States Senate.

Video Transcript

This is probably one of the most famous pictures in the history of the NFL, Tom Brady’s combine weigh-in picture, an embarrassing photo that gets resurfaced all over the internet year after combine year.

But where did it come from?

And why is Tom Brady’s photo seemingly the only one we’ve ever seen?

I always joke about that picture, like no one else has a picture like that.

Where’s Peyton Manning’s picture?

I- he didn’t look great in those, in those gray shorts either, so.

Chasing Pick 199: the search for the origins of the Tom Brady combine picture.

These days, the first place to begin any good sports investigation is with Pablo Torre, and two years ago on a podcast episode, he credited the Brady photo to Sports Illustrated.

Now, I couldn’t find anything in the actual magazines, but I did find something on their sports culture blog, Extra Mustard, which took a break from covering other important stories to post this on February 21st, 2013.

And if you look closely at the famous photo, Sports Illustrated actually credits the NFL Network.

So now we have a timeframe.

The NFL Network was launched in late 2003, so that means that sometime between then and this post, the Brady combine photo was broadcast over their airwaves.

But with countless hours of live coverage over those 10 years, I couldn’t possibly pin down the exact moment the photo first aired.

But then I remembered NFL Films.

First created in 1962, NFL Films has been beautifully documenting the league for decades.

But when the NFL Network was formed, NFL Films got put under their umbrella, so anything that they made could also be credited as NFL Network.

And bingo.

Right there in the easily searchable NFL Films archives, you’ll find a documentary that aired on April 12th, 2011, called The Brady Six, about the six quarterbacks drafted ahead of Tom Brady.

And in this segment explaining why Tom’s hometown 49ers passed on him for Giovanni Carmazzi, we have a crucial discovery, a new wrinkle in the search for the Brady photo that changes everything.

It’s not a photo at all.

It’s a video, a video filmed by an in-house NFL crew for teams to use internally to evaluate players, not something ever intended for broadcast.

So someone from NFL Films, desperate to visually prove why the 49ers didn’t draft Tom Brady, dug this footage out of the deeply sealed league archives.

So it was the 49ers and Steve Mariucci that were responsible for first exposing the Brady picture.

My quest was seemingly complete.

But there was a flag on the play.

This documentary first aired in 2011, but if you search Tom Brady combine photo on Twitter, people are making jokes about it as early as 2009, two years before the documentary ever existed.

There must be an earlier source out there, and one final clue was about to break it wide open.

Now, back in 2009 during the time of the first Brady combine picture jokes, Twitter did not allow you to include a photo in a tweet, so often people would get around this by putting a link to a photo.

Most of these links are dead, but if you plug a few into the Wayback Machine, you get the original photo, and that’s where I found this final clue.

All of these old photos have this watermark in the corner.

It’s even on this Brady photo on the Patriots’ official website, Toleroad.

Now, Toleroad was a popular LGBTQ blog written by Andy Toll during the heyday of blogging.

And on January 2nd, 2008, he published this blog that documented the first time the public ever saw the famous Tom Brady combine video, noting that it was during a matchup between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.

But something is still off.

This screenshot has an NBC logo on it, not NFL Network.

Was this another false start?

Is Toleroad not the answer?

To get to the bottom of this rogue logo, I needed to examine the game itself, and it turns out this was no ordinary game.

It was one of the biggest games of the year.

The Patriots were 15 and 0, and they were facing the Giants on the road in an attempt to complete the first ever perfect regular season since the ’72 Dolphins, and Tom Brady was only two passes away from breaking the single-season passing touchdown record, and Randy Moss was also going for the single-season receiving touchdown record.

This was a huge game.

But since this was a week 17 Saturday night game, the NFL Network had the exclusive rights to air the game on cable.

The NFL Network had just started broadcasting full exclusive games the season before in 2006, but they were mostly meaningless Thursday night games.

The fact that this possibly historic perfect season game would be stuck on an obscure new league-owned cable channel made some fans so upset that it reached the United States Senate, where members of the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the NFL threatening to reconsider the league’s antitrust exemption under US law if they didn’t make the game more widely available.

The NFL caved.

In a never before seen arrangement, the game was broadcast live on both CBS, NBC, and the NFL Network at the same time, which not only explains our Toleroad screenshot logo, but it also might be the reason the combine video even aired in the first place.

Because although the game was aired on three different channels, it was the NFL Network that actually produced the game on the ground.

And knowing that they would have this gigantic triple-sized audience, they pulled out all the stops on the production to showcase just how well their much maligned and little subscribed to cable channel could actually produce a real game.

And this included doing something no network broadcast partner could possibly do, digging into their sealed archives to find an embarrassing combine video of one of the team’s star players.

So I found the game online and scrubbed to the very moment the Tom Brady combine picture first entered the football universe.

This is the one Tom Brady would prefer we didn’t show, but this is Tom when he came out of college at the combine.

I can only tell you that I am so happy they didn’t videotape my combine.

Now, that’s a very interesting quote by Cris Collinsworth, because years later, the NFL would once again dig into its secret combine archives to produce another embarrassing combine weigh-in picture, this time of Cris Collinsworth, and it was shown to him by Peyton Manning.

So in a way, Tom Brady shouldn’t be calling for Elon to delete his picture from the internet.

He really should be calling for the NFL to continue to dive into their archives and release some other embarrassing combine pictures to make his a little bit less unique.

Uncovering the origins of the most famous photo in NFL history

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