It’s time for Tom Brady to pick. Or better yet, for the NFL to make him choose.
Brady’s twin roles as a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders and the lead voice for the NFL on Fox can no longer coexist. The lines are too muddled, the potential for scandal unnecessary.
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After a painful rookie season in the broadcast booth, Brady has had a promising start to his second year. In week one, on the Giants-Commanders call, he put together the best performance of his fledgling career. He sounded relaxed – confident, even. The whisper-shout that he revealed last year, an attempt to rebrand himself as Broadcaster Brady, was dropped. In its place came a more natural delivery and cadence. He was sharp. He seemed to be having fun. Rather than try to cram five thoughts into one sentence, he hit his landmarks with clarity. Now and then, he was even insightful, dropping nuggets that offered insight into how the greatest to ever do it visualizes the game.
Eight days later, Brady wandered into his other chair as a team owner. He was in Vegas to watch the Raiders play the Chargers on Monday Night Football. ESPN showed Brady wearing a headset while sitting in the Raiders’ coaching booth. During the broadcast, sideline reporter Peter Schrager said: “[Raiders offensive coordinator] Chip Kelly told us he talks to Brady two to three times per week. They go through film. They go through the gameplan. Brady is a luxury for the coaches. Who else has an owner who has actually been there, done that?”
The NFL posted the clip of Brady sitting next to Vegas’ coaching staff, then promptly deleted it.
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In a flash, you can see the problem. Even Brady seemed to recognize it, slinking lower and lower in his chair as if he was about to hide under the desk. There you have the highest-paid analyst in the sport listening in as his coaching staff make decisions and call plays.
Sports media is littered with conflicts of interest. Insiders are represented by the same agencies as the players and executives they cover. Talking heads are friends with coaches and GMs. Every announcer has relationships, dating back to their playing days or built throughout their broadcasting career. Heck, ESPN recently acquired NFL Network and other league properties, with the NFL taking an equity stake in the World Wide Leader as part of the deal. Wrap your head around that: the media company that reports on the league now has the NFL’s 32 owners among its shareholders – including, funnily enough, Brady.
Related: Tom Brady draws online ire as he appears in Las Vegas Raiders coaching booth
The lines between the broadcast partners and the league aren’t blurred; they no longer exist.
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Brady’s case is just the most brazen, the one with a public face. You almost have to admire the transparency. Brady is not feigning independence. He’s a part-owner and key decision maker for one franchise, and then he covers the other 31 teams on Sundays.
But everything about it feels off. And that’s not on Brady. He hasn’t broken any rules. It would be foolish of the Raiders to have the greatest quarterback of all time in their organization and not have him involved in gameplanning. The fault lies with the NFL. How does the league allow the most visible show in its portfolio, America’s Game of the Week, to employ someone who sits in production meetings with opposing coaches and players, who strolls the sideline before kickoff, and then, a week later, sits in a booth with a coach’s headset on?
A year ago, the NFL tied itself in knots to keep Brady’s analyst role and his Raiders ownership separate. The firewall has since collapsed. This offseason, the league relaxed its rules: Brady cannot physically enter another team’s facility until gameday, which mean he can’t attend team practices, but he can attend virtual production calls, asking coaches and players questions in the run-up to broadcasts.
The goal was for Fox to tighten up Brady’s broadcasting chops – and stop the league from being embarrassed during one of its most-watched games of the week. But when Brady asks questions in those meetings, who is listening to the reply? Brady the broadcaster or Brady the Raiders owner? Can he separate the two?
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Brady has already called the Commanders and Giants game, and both of those teams are on the Raiders’ schedule. Ditto for the Chiefs and Eagles, the game Brady called in week two. This week, he will be on the call for Bears-Cowboys. Brady’s Raiders will play the Bears a week later.
Production meetings are largely a nothing burger. Coaches do not reveal their gameplan. They guard any strategic insight or injury update like a state secret. There is probably nothing Brady can take from those meetings that he cannot figure out from publicly available data or from studying the two teams on his own.
But having Brady toggle between roles still leaves doubt about which hat he’s wearing at any given time. Is the Fox audience receiving his authentic views, or a sanitized version from an owner who has his eye on a future signing or hiring? Last year, Brady was unable to criticize officials while working for Fox due to the league’s policy for team owners.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if Tom Brady were not Tom Brady. But he is. There is an idolatry around Brady within the NFL that doesn’t exist for his co-workers. People want to speak to Brady, to tap into his fountain of knowledge and connect with the sport’s most relentless champion. Maybe a sideline chat is a player’s one chance to talk to the man who has won seven Super Bowls.
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Brady isn’t able to attend Friday practices, where broadcasters see the real inner workings of a team. But he can build connections in the week leading up to a game and chop it up with players or coaches on the field before he steps into the announcer’s booth. He is also in charge of hiring and firing for one of the 32 teams. Last season, he called a playoff game featuring the Lions while interviewing both Detroit coordinators for his own vacant head coaching job. If Brady is talking to a player or coach under his guise as a Fox broadcaster, those people are aware he could one day offer them a job.
Perhaps nothing comes from those meetings except filler to help pad out a three-hour blowout. But, surely, Brady, an uber-competitor and football savant, can gather some detail. Maybe it’s the body language of a coach or an impending free agent. Maybe there’s an injury insight that’s not yet available to the public.
And here’s the kicker: if Brady didn’t notice anything, didn’t file it away to use later, he wouldn’t be doing his job. Not as a Fox analyst, taking the audience inside the game; not as a Raiders owner, trying to build a champion. Those two incentives clash in a way no league should tolerate.
Sure, if you’re telling Brady details about your team, that’s on you. But what if you’re a soon-to-be free agent who sees the Raiders oozing with cap space? What if you’re a young coach who likes the idea of being Vegas’ defensive coordinator? Maybe the halo effect of Brady gets you to reveal something in a five-minute conversation you wouldn’t with, say, Cris Collinsworth. It’s a tightrope that teams and players shouldn’t have to walk.
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Collinsworth, the lead analyst for NBC, also has a business relationship with all 32 franchises as the owner of Pro Football Focus. But there are no competing interests between his off-camera and on-camera work. He doesn’t have a stake in a franchise, sit on a team’s headset, or make personnel decisions. He owns a data and software company that sells licenses to any organization that is happy to buy. The boundaries – and any perceived conflicts – are clear. His work with PFF amplifies his work for NBC.
With Brady, it’s murkier. It would be one thing if Brady were a silent shareholder, a passive partner that the Raiders rolled out to seal commercial deals. But his fingerprints are all over the franchise.
“Tom is the one now to take this organization into the future, on the football side, and maybe get my failures into successes,” Mark Davis said in September.
Brady led the committee that hired new general manager John Spytek, a former college teammate who also worked with Brady in Tampa when the pair won a Super Bowl. Brady also interviewed head coaching candidates for the Raiders opening, ultimately settling on Pete Carroll. That’s not absentee ownership. So when Brady slips on the headset in the Raiders’ booth, he is not an angel investor. He is, in the clearest possible sense, part of the football operation. Pretending otherwise requires the kind of willful ignorance only Roger Goodell can muster.
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Even if nothing comes from Brady’s side-hustle with Fox that helps the Raiders, the perception matters as much as the substance. It is Brady seeming like he is above the rules, and the fracturing of fan trust at a time when trust is the league’s chief commodity.
That truest has eroded as gambling has become the NFL’s central nervous system. Betting isn’t just an addendum to the action any more; it sometimes appears it has become the sole function of games. It’s everywhere: pre-game, mid-game, in your face, on your feed, on the broadcast ticker, blasted through RedZone, radiating through every commercial break. The league has recognized that the embrace of gambling requires a level of trust from fans, which is why suspensions for players or coaches caught gambling on other sports have been so severe.
Thinking the NFL is scripted is something only your wacky cousin brings up at Thanksgiving. But there is a reason the meme has come to life, why officiating decisions are scrutinized and why Brady’s firewall matters. Once trust cracks – when fans begin to suspect that insider access might tilt competition – the whole edifice wobbles.
Allowing Brady to take on both roles is about short-term convenience. The NFL wants to stay in the Brady business, to leverage his cachet and the attention he draws into dollars. When he talks, people listen. Where he goes, others follow. It’s why Fox is paying him $325m and Saudi Arabia is paying him a reported $75m to play flag football.
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Being the Goat has its privileges. But calling games while running a franchise shouldn’t be one of them.
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