Tom Brady catches all the breaks. First, the Tuck Rule helped pave the way for his charmed NFL career. Now, there’s the Brady Exception to ease his unexpectedly rough transition into the broadcast booth.
Quick refresher: In May 2022 Fox rushed to sign Brady to a blockbuster 10-year, $375m deal to work as their lead analyst once he retired (that ended up being the end of the 2022 season). Then, a year later, Brady called a surprise audible and bought a 5% stake in the Las Vegas Raiders, without apparently considering how that might affect his position at Fox. In a typical setup, the top broadcast booths embed with the teams they’re covering in the days leading up to a game. But with Brady also a part-owner of the Raiders, other NFL teams justifiably worried his TV role would allow him to gain inside information on opponents.
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After 17 months of haggling with league owners – as Brady struggled through standup comedy, divorce and other post-retirement fumbles – the Raiders deal was approved on the condition that he stay out of Fox’s team briefings. With only his 23 years experience and broadcast partner Kevin Burkhardt’s notes to draw from, Brady finally made his Fox debut in 2024. The results have not been pretty.
Which brings us back to the Brady Exception. After making such a big deal of the QB’s sneak to the Raiders, NFL owners are reportedly allowing Brady to attend pre-game production meetings with players and coaches while upholding the ban on him attending team practices. The concession is as much a testament to Brady always getting his way as it is a troubling indicator of the NFL’s hasty retreat from integrity and objectivity. After all, this is the league in which the former commissioner Pete Rozelle introduced himself to team owners after washing himself with the phrase: “I can honestly say that I come to you with clean hands.”
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That mission statement, which set the tone for 30 years of league prosperity that was guided in large part by Rozelle’s unerring moral compass, has a strange ring now. A month before the owners reversed field on Brady, the NFL unveiled another piece of news that may have jarred with Rozelle. The league announced the acquisition of a 10% equity stake in ESPN, meaning it is now a part-owner of a broadcaster that, among other things, reported objectively on the NFL itself in the past.
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That’s not the only way the NFL has influence over a media that is supposed to interrogate the league’s actions. NFL games accounted for 72 of the 100 most-watched telecasts in the US in 2024, making the league’s product extremely valuable to broadcasters. In turn, that means those same broadcasters may be reluctant to bring up uncomfortable storylines for the league, particularly around concussion and brain trauma in players. “You can’t get this issue on television anymore,” the former footballer turned neuroscientist Chris Nowinski told me last month. “That’s primarily because the NFL has now given a game to every media platform. It’s not even a well-kept secret that anybody who carries game broadcasts is very concerned about [not calling attention to] CTE in the NFL.”
Speaking of fixes: how different have NFL telecasts looked since the US supreme court struck down prohibitions on gaming in 2018? The sports books that once styled themselves as portals for “daily fantasy football” to sneak their adverts into games have long since abandoned the ruse. The 2022 Super Bowl was more a pretext for gambling ads. The 2024 Super Bowl – the first ever staged in Las Vegas, home of Brady’s Raiders – instigated more than $1bn in bets, with roughly one-tenth of that take passing through the sports books that surround Allegiant Stadium, which, in case it’s unclear, is rather conveniently situated just off the Las Vegas Strip.
Rozelle didn’t just see gambling as an existential threat to his league. He was convinced it might take down all of sports, and society with it, if given the chance to run amok. When a 1963 league investigation found that two NFL players had bet on games and associated with known gamblers, Rozelle wanted to ban them for life but ultimately suspended them for a year. But now headlines about NFL players getting busted for gambling recur in between trade news and injury updates – and record salaries have done little to dissuade them from risking potential suspension for a few thousand dollars of side-action.
Worse, the financial vice problem would appear to extend well beyond the locker room. In July, CNBC reported that more than 100 players and club personnel were fined and penalized for violating the ticket resale policies for Super Bowl 59. Last March, a Jacksonville Jaguars employee was sent to prison for embezzling $22m from the team. Between those infractions and the NFL somehow eliding responsibility for its outsized role in promoting cryptocurrency, pro football would seem to have entered the era of grift.
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What would Rozelle make of his precious NFL, America’s most watched and prosperous league, selling out to Big Betting? What would he make of his former intern, present-day commissioner Roger Goodell, letting this happen while sticking to the claim that his “No 1 job is protecting the integrity of the game”? Goodell, after all, signed on as an advisor on the physical fitness council of Donald Trump, a president who once called large swathes of NFL players “sons of bitches”. And Goodell solemnly swore, under oath, that gambling was the greatest threat to the integrity of pro football only to lay down his shield. In the ownership deal with NFL, ESPN gained operational control over the league’s media properties and its popular RedZone Channel – a gambler’s paradise that will now include commercial breaks for the first time in its 16-year history. New York governor Kathy Hochul was among scores of incredulous viewers who vented about the decision online. Seven hours of commercial-free football is RedZone’s entire raison d’être!
Time and again, Goodell gaslights NFL fans. He dismissed them as “ridiculous” for accusing the league of being biased toward the Kansas City Chiefs – and then quietly relegated three officials to the college ranks as a PR sacrifice. (“There are no favorites,” an anonymous league source told the officiating news site Football Zebras. “There’s no favoritism. There’s none of that; it’s all about performance.”) Fans like to joke about there being a master script for the NFL that preordains the on-field results – the three-peat Chiefs arc in which a pop star love interest is introduced. The more the NFL comprises its core values, the more it risks fans thinking it is heading in the direction of professional wrestling, an intentional work of fiction.
And if things keep trending in that direction, where would that leave Brady? He’s got enough trouble playing it straight in the booth without going wildly over the top, and his own history of benefiting from rules violations can make him an even more unreliable narrator for NFL games. Only time will tell if the Brady Exception actually makes him a better TV analyst. But this much, at least, is inarguable: the NFL is committed to projecting the appearance of integrity and objectivity, even as it stares dead at you through the screen and calmly washes its hands of the matter in real time.
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