This NFL season was one of firsts for former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady as he set off on the first year of his broadcasting deal and agreed to become a team owner.
But while both those ventures are exciting and new for Brady, many fans and pundits believe his ownership of the Raiders could lead to a conflict of interest with his work as a color commentator on Fox Sports.
While the NFL has set up a series of rules that handicap his ability to prepare for games as a broadcaster, some in the sports media world aren’t fully convinced that Brady’s two jobs avoid conflicting with each other.
Mike Florio, an NFL insider for NBC who has worked for the network for decades, is one of those people.
In a recent appearance on the podcast ‘SI Media with Jimmy Traina’, Florio said that Fox agreeing to keep Brady around after his ownership stake was confirmed this year was mind-boggling.
‘I’ve been with NBC for 15 years now. There is no way in hell NBC would give Tom Brady a microphone when he owns a piece of a team,’ Florio said.
NBC Sports’ Mike Florio believes Fox hasn’t done enough to address Tom Brady’s potential conflict of interest now that he’s a partial owner of the Las Vegas Raiders
Brady’s stake in the team was finalized this year, the same year he joined Fox’s broadcast team
‘They would never do it. They would say, ‘Tom you’ve gotta pick a lane. You cannot do this.’ Fox should have done that.
‘Which explains why, if they’re willing to do it, then they’ll just brush it under the rug, do a word salad, check the box handling of it.’
Florio specifically pointed to another fellow media personality, ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit, as an example.
Herbstreit has been a color commentator for the network’s college football coverage for years – doing so alongside his work on ESPN’s touring preview show, ‘College GameDay’.
At the end of each ‘GameDay’ episode, the panel of college football experts (usually with a celebrity guest) makes predictions on how each game is going to pan out. Herbstreit almost always doesn’t make picks on games he’s broadcasting later that day.
Florio questioned what would happen if the Raiders were to make a Super Bowl in the course of Brady’s ten-year tenue with Fox and how the network would handle it.
‘Fans are always looking for a, ‘you’re against my team.’ Hell, he owns ten percent of the Raiders! That’s a factor in what teams are going to look at or fans are going to look at when they’re trying to assess how objective he is or isn’t being,’ Florio remarked.
Despite these concerns, Florio said he didn’t think Fox should axe Brady. Rather, he believes the network should ‘disclose’ any conflicts the 47-year-old has to the audience.
Brady’s first season in the booth was a rough one for him as he’s received plenty of criticism
Brady will be beside play-by-play partner Kevin Burkhardt (L) to call Super Bowl LIX
Those conflicts might get much worse if the Raiders suddenly get better as a team. While they seem pretty far from that possibility now, ten years is a long time and if Las Vegas improves, Florio believes that the NFL could be forced to act.
‘Here’s where the league will sour on it,’ Florio explained. ‘When they realize that Brady having this ability as an owner to constantly have his finger on the pulse of the ever-evolving NFL, going into these stadiums, talking to these people.
‘When they see a wavy line between that and the Raiders no longer being a team that the other teams don’t have to worry about, that might be when some of the owners say, “Hey, we’ve gotta stop this. He’s got perspective and insight that the rest of us don’t have. We go to our own games, he’s going to all these games, he’s getting all these ideas and he’s made the Raiders better.” That’s when you’d have an uprising among some owners to shut this down.’
Brady was widely criticized for his broadcasting during his first season, but says he has no plans to give it up after just one year.
He’ll be alongside Kevin Burkhardt when Fox broadcasts Super Bowl LIX in just a few weeks time.
