Dallas Cowboys need to stop talking to Tom Brady until this happens | Opinion
A few days before the Dallas Cowboys play in Denver next month, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should schedule a sit-down with head coach Brian Schottenheimer and quarterback Dak Prescott.
In this new age of the NFL, team co-owners are allowed 30-minute visits, or longer, with their next scheduled opponent’s coaches and top players; Rice is one of the owners of the Denver Broncos.
If Tom Brady is allowed to do it, so should Condi Rice. Or any other NFL co-owner.
On Sunday afternoon in Chicago, there was the minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, who has been pictured sitting in the coaches’ booth during a Raiders game this season, in the Fox booth calling Cowboys at Bears.
This laughable conflict of interest has moved into America’s “Ethics Are For Losers” 744,000-square-foot mansion, which these days needs a new wing. Fox Sports and the NFL are equally culpable in creating a situation that has an easy solution that neither party has any interest in pursuing.
Because despite their wealth and power, NFL and Fox Sports executives are at heart jock-sniffing dorks who will do anything to appease a good sports player, and pretty blonde girls. The types of people who blew them off in high school.
When Fox Sports bumped former Panthers tight end Greg Olsen from its top broadcasting tandem and replaced him with Brady, and then needlessly made Brady one of the highest-paid men in the business, he had no ownership of an NFL team.
Brady is not nearly as good as Olsen in the booth, but he is Tom Brady.
Access to information
Because Brady is a football addict, and has more money than most, he bought a small stake in the Las Vegas Raiders. He did not buy a share to have some fun, and to sit in the owner’s suite a few times a year, as is the norm in these instances.
He wants to influence football beyond calling a game.
To call a game for Fox Sports, he has access to chat with the coaches and top players during a weekly production meeting. Some of these coaches, like the Chargers’ Jim Harbaugh, famously pull a Bill Belichick and give nothing during these casual chats. Others are more forthcoming, and provide some details on background to help with the quality of the broadcast.
However Fox Sports and the NFL want to spin this, it’s a clear conflict of interest. Or, all of the secrecy the league and its teams participate in is a waste of time, and for show.
Even though Brady took to Twitter to dismiss this as a 12-pack of Nothing Beer, it is. The Raiders coach in the 2024 season, Antonio Pierce, said last week that when he would talk to Brady, the ex-Pat would mention what he heard in these production meetings.
Last week, Pierce said on SiriusXM Mad Dog Radio that Brady “was a great asset for us” in 2024. (By the way, the Raiders were 4-13 last season and Pierce was fired.)
The NFL is full of coaches, players, scouts and general managers whose days are occupied by looking for the tiniest blade that could be an edge, and this sort of unique access is something that the rest of the league is not permitted. Who would think to even ask for something like this?
Charissa Thompson shows no one cares
And yet Brady and Fox get away with it easily. Because how binding are these “conflict of interest rules” that sound great in a university classroom, but now more than ever have zero effect on the bottom line?
News media is awash in instances where “conflict of Interest” is now a point of sale.
Fox Sports is the same network that didn’t do a thing when one of its most prominent sports anchors and sideline “reporters,” Charissa Thompson, brazenly admitted twice that she made up news during multiple broadcasts. Because, who really cares as long as it sounds, and looks, good?
Thompson is pretty, which is her most marketable skill set. Don’t worry. She knows it. TV is a visual medium, and the majority of NFL fans are visual craving-creatures. This math (2 + 2 = Hot) wins.
The irony is Fox could have fired her and replaced her with another attractive woman, and it wouldn’t have affected any decimal point of its rating of one of its NFL broadcasts. The same for Brady and his role as the No. 1 analyst.
Retired sports broadcaster Brent Musburger once said that fans don’t care who calls the games, a point that executives use to a merciless degree when negotiating contracts with most TV broadcasters. Not all of them.
Because there are some rules and guidelines that exist only because they sound good.
Fox and the NFL could easily solve this by insisting Brady can do one or the other but not both. They don’t because they want him to like them.
So he does whatever he wants, which is fine as long as Condi Rice and other NFL co-owners have the same privileges.
