Tom Brady's new job is an insult to NFL fans

Tom Brady is handsome enough, rich enough, and skilled enough to be able to do more or less whatever he wants. Brady wants to leave his pregnant girlfriend for one of the most famous supermodels in the world? It's his business. Brady wants to capitalize on the pandemic to sell some immune-system snake oil to his adoring fans? She is successful and gorgeous. Brady wants to make billions in advertising for a fraudulent and soon-to-be-melted-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 well. Maybe he'll get his own investment back, and he deserves it. The American dream of excess and imperfection only works if men like Brady can embody them.

But the NFL and Fox took that idea too far. In a world full of people willing to grant Brady's wishes, the most powerful sports league and a top broadcast partner have conspired to make Brady richer, and this time, to the detriment of football fans. More than any favorable treatment Brady received from on-field officials, his next chapter in the NFL would be the most disturbing, disturbing example of the sport's preferential treatment toward him.

Brady owns a new part of the Las Vegas Raiders, a team that played in Brady's native Bay Area before owner Mark Davis lifelessly tore it up in the desert in pursuit of a taxpayer-funded stadium. Brady and a business partner finalized their purchase of a 10 percent stake in the team this week, at a valuation of about $3.5 billion, CNBC reported. Brady owning a team came as no surprise, just as Michael Jordan's purchase of an NBA team seemed natural. That will be the case even after LeBron James stops playing.

Where Brady's equity in the Raiders has reached a cosmic level of farce is in the other hats the NFL will let him wear at the same time. Brady began this season as the top booth analyst on Fox's game broadcasts. He rakes in about $37.5 million a year in that work. For six weeks, Brady has been perfectly fine in the booth, drawing reviews that mostly sit in between Below average And pretty good. It doesn't matter how good Brady is at analyzing games and communicating his thoughts to the audience, though. Brady's job is to look good and fulfill the important task of being Tom Brady. Fox is a large public company, the NFL is perhaps its most valuable asset, and Brady is a superstar who makes the joint Fox-NFL product shine. In a vacuum, that would be fine, even though Brady replaced a great analyst who turned out to be a mildly famous former tight end rather than the best quarterback ever. Brady, after all, plays by different rules.

But Brady is never going to be a serious TV commentator — not when he owns part of a team. He has worked under several restrictions this season that have kept him from truly leveling up as a broadcaster. Those rules are probably the only ones in the world that Brady faces, and most people don't, designed to handle the obvious potential for conflicts of interest when a man who owns a team serves as the front man in a league with 31 other teams. Now there will be this limit. As the NFL's highest-profile commentator, Brady now co-owns a team and thus cannot:

• Attend broadcast production meetings, either in person or remotely, as TV crews receive information about NFL teams during those meetings. A coach may not share with another team owner what he would share with a broadcaster.

• Criticize a team other than the Raiders (although it's unclear where the NFL draws the line between negative analysis and illegal “criticism”)

• Criticize Game Officials (like this)

• Communicate with other team members beyond superficial social media contact, as NFL owners are not supposed to chat with other team players.

Not being able to do these things means that Brady, despite his one-of-a-kind football mind, has no chance to be more than an OK analyst. His lack of presence at production meetings, during which his peers may 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 within the NFL's rules for team owners.

The problem is that many people associated with any given game deserve to be criticized. Officials make bad calls. Can Brady say it? Does he have to say it with a certain level of politeness? Quarterbacks make terrible plays, and team owners make terrible decisions to trot them out there. Can Brady address the obvious fact that Deshaun Watson has become one of the worst passers in league history? Could he also be hinting at the dozens of sexual assault allegations against Watson, or would that count as beneath criticism of a club owner? How far the NFL and Fox let Brady go isn't the point. The mere fact that he has to be aware of some vague boundaries.

Maybe this all seems like an overreaction. After all, NFL TV commentators all Works for media corporations who do business with the league for billions of dollars. Tony Romo doesn't blame Roger Goodell for his brutality in hitting CBS. Troy Aikman doesn't go on about Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper's incompetence at ESPN. Everyone involved in the league knows where their bread is buttered, and in that tradition, perhaps Brady doesn't appear to stand out on the surface.

But his case is different. TV commentators sometimes say interesting things about the NFL. Team owners don't, unless they're throwing a fit for attention in the style of Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys. Brady is already a milquetoast, image-conscious man, and now he serves more masters than anyone who has done his commentary work. will be you Go out of your way to say something compelling about a football game if it could get you reprimanded by 31 of the world's most powerful capitalists, who suddenly became your business partners? Millions of people watch Brady every week and his commentary is the first filter through which many of them perceive professional football.

Brady has spent decades molding himself into the best quarterback who ever lived. Not two months into his first season as broadcaster, he's confirmed he'll never be more than mediocre in this new job. He'll be paid, and Fox and the NFL will benefit slightly more from having him attached to a marquee game each week. Anyone who chooses to listen to semi-independent commentary will have to deal with the charade. This isn't the first time Brady has collected a generous check for peddling nonsense