When Fox hired Tom Brady to be its lead NFL analyst, the move made sense — even if it meant demoting a great talent in Greg Olsen. Brady is the best quarterback to ever play, and having recently retired, he’d theoretically bring enormous familiarity and expertise on today’s NFL.
That hasn’t exactly played out in the first few weeks of Brady’s broadcasting career, and it’s almost certainly about to get worse. He’s no longer allowed to be honest to his audience.
On Tuesday, the league’s owners officially approved a Brady-led group in the purchase of a 10 percent stake in the Las Vegas Raiders. That effectively made Brady a co-owner and someone with a financial incentive in seeing the Raiders succeed all while speaking to viewers as an impartial expert. The conflict is obvious.
But in an effort to keep Brady from using insider information or abusing this conflict of interest, the league placed restrictions on what Brady can do and say as a Fox broadcaster. And, uh, it’s a lot.
Here’s how it’s going to impact his day-to-day life with his broadcasting gig 👀
(via @SethWickersham) pic.twitter.com/JUSORiNwxI
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) October 15, 2024
According to ESPN, Brady won’t be allowed in non-Raiders facilities (besides the stadiums he works to call games from). He can’t watch practices. He can’t attend broadcast production meetings in any capacity, which is a massive restriction on an announcer as those meetings are used to craft talking points and insight to carry a broadcast for three-plus hours.
He also can’t criticize game officials or other teams, which, again, is a wild limit to put on a broadcaster. He’d basically have to watch a potential game-changing missed call and either stay quiet or deflect blame away from the refs. That’s just a terrible disservice to viewers.
We’ll have to see how this all plays out on Sundays. But it can’t be good, particularly for a novice broadcaster like Brady. We may be at the point where we wonder if Brady is bad or just contractually limited to be bad at a job that is paying him $375 million over a decade.