The retired QB's massive new conflict of interest is a slap in the face.
Tom Brady is handsome enough, rich enough, and accomplished enough that he should be able to do more or less whatever he wants. Brady wants to leave his pregnant girlfriend for one of the world's most famous supermodels? That's his business. Brady wants to capitalize on the pandemic to sell a bit of immune-system snake oil to his adoring fans? He's successful and gorgeous. Brady wants to make zillions doing commercials for a fraudulent and soon-to-melt-down crypto exchange, urging people to throw money into the pot before it all goes kaboom? When did capitalism become a crime? And besides, the bankruptcy proceedings are going quite well. Maybe he'll get his own investment back, and he deserves it. Dreams of American excess and infallibility work only if men like Brady can embody them.
But the NFL and Fox have taken this concept too far. In a world full of people who are willing to cater to Brady's wishes, the most powerful sports league and a top broadcast partner have colluded to make Brady even richer and, this time, to do it in a way that harms football fans. More than any favorable treatment Brady ever got from on-field officials, his next chapter in the NFL will be the most galling, annoying example of the sport's preferential treatment toward him.
Brady is a new part owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, a team that played in Brady's native Bay Area before owner Mark Davis soullessly ripped it away to the desert in pursuit of a taxpayer-funded stadium. Brady and a business partner this week finalized their purchase of a 10 percent stake in the team, buying in at a roughly $3.5 billion valuation, CNBC reported. Brady's becoming a team owner surprises no one, just as Michael Jordan's buying an NBA team felt natural. It will be the same after LeBron James stops playing.
Where Brady's equity in the Raiders reaches a cosmic level of farce is in the other hat the NFL will let him wear at the same time. Brady started this season as the top booth analyst for Fox's game broadcasts. He collects about $37.5 million a year in that job. Through six weeks, Brady has been perfectly fine in the booth, drawing reviews that sit mostly between below average and pretty good. It doesn't matter how good Brady is at analyzing games and conveying his thoughts to viewers, though. Brady's job is to look pretty and fulfill the crucial job of being Tom Brady. Fox is a big public company, the NFL is perhaps its most precious asset, and Brady is a superstar who makes the joint Fox-NFL product glitzier. In a vacuum, that would be fine, even though Brady replaced a tremendous analyst who just so happened to be a mildly famous former tight end, instead of the best quarterback ever. Brady, after all, plays by different rules.
But Brady is never going to be a serious TV commentator -- not while he owns part of a team. He has worked this season under a series of restrictions that have kept him from truly leveling up as a broadcaster. These rules are perhaps the only ones in the world that Brady faces and most human beings do not, designed to manage the obvious potential for a conflict of interest when a guy who owns one team serves as a front man for a league with 31 other teams. Now these limits will remain. As the highest-profile commentator in the NFL, Brady now co-owns a team and thus cannot:
Not being able to do these things means that Brady, despite his one-of-a-kind football mind, has no chance of being more than an OK analyst. His lack of attendance at production meetings, during which his colleagues can interview coaches, may not be a huge deal. (Brady can study game tape with the best of them to compensate.) But Brady will spend every second of every broadcast for his entire Fox career straddling a line between speaking honestly and staying onside of the NFL's rules for owners of teams.
The problem is that many people associated with any given game deserve to be criticized. Officials make bad calls. Can Brady say that? Does he have to say it with a certain level of politeness? Quarterbacks make terrible plays, and team owners make terrible decisions to keep trotting them out there. Can Brady point out the obvious fact that Deshaun Watson has morphed into one of the worst passers in league history? Can he even allude to the dozens of sexual assault allegations against Watson, or would that count as criticism beneath an owner of a club? How much the NFL and Fox let Brady get away with isn't the point. The mere fact that he'll have to be cognizant of some nebulous boundary is enough.
Maybe this all feels like an overreaction. After all, NFL TV commentators all work for media corporations that do billions of dollars in commerce with the league. Tony Romo does not take Roger Goodell to task for his callousness over concussions on CBS. Troy Aikman does not go on and on about the incompetence of Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper on ESPN. Everyone associated with the league knows where their bread is buttered, and in that tradition, maybe Brady does not appear on the surface to be different.
But his case is different. TV commentators sometimes say interesting things about the NFL. Team owners do not, unless they're throwing fits to get attention in the style of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones. Brady is already a milquetoast, image-conscious man, and now he serves more masters than anyone who has ever done his commentating job. Would you go out of your way to say anything compelling about a football game if it might subject you to recriminations from 31 of the most powerful capitalists in the world, who were suddenly your business partners? Tens of millions of people will watch Brady each week, and his commentary will be the first filter through which many of them perceive professional football.
Brady spent decades molding himself into the best quarterback who ever lived. Not two months into his first season as a broadcaster, he has ensured he will never be much more than mediocre in this new job. He will get paid, and Fox and the NFL will reap marginally higher benefits from having him attached to a marquee game each week. Anyone who would prefer to hear quasi-independent commentary will have to deal with the charade. It will not be the first time Brady has collected a generous check to peddle bullshit.