Tom Brady’s jaunt into the Raiders’ coaching booth exposed an NFL blind spot | Tom Brady

It’s time for Tom Brady to choose. Or better yet, so that the NFL does Choose him.

Brady’s twin roles as a minority owner of Las Vegas raiders and the main voice of NFL on Fox can no longer coexist. The lines are too confined, the potential for unnecessary scandal.

After a painful season recruited in the broadcast stand, Brady had a promising start of his second year. During the first week, on the call of giant commanders, he implemented the best performance of his nascent career. He looked relaxed – confident, even. The whisper he revealed last year, an attempt to rename himself as a Brady diffuser, was abandoned. In place came a more natural delivery and pace. He was sharp. He seemed to have fun. Rather than trying to grasp five thoughts in one sentence, he struck his bearings with clarity. From time to time, he was even perceptive, dropping nuggets which offered an overview of how the biggest to make it visualize the game.

Eight days later, Brady wandered in his other chair as the team owner. He was in Vegas to watch the raiders play the loads on Monday evening football on Monday evening. ESPN has shown that Brady carrying a headset in the coach of the raiders. During the broadcasting, the journalist of the Peter Schrager’s sidelines said: “[Raiders offensive coordinator] Chip Kelly told us that he is talking to Brady two to three times a week. They go through a film. They go through the game plan. Brady is a luxury for coaches. Who else has an owner who was really there, did this?

The NFL posted Brady’s clip seated next to the Vegas coaches staff, then quickly deleted it.

In a flash, you can see the problem. Even Brady seemed to recognize him, sliding closer and lower on his chair as if he were about to hide under the office. There you have the best paid analyst in the sport to listen her Coach staff make decisions and call games.

Sports media are strewn with conflicts of interest. The initiates are represented by the same agencies as the players and the leaders they cover. Speaking heads are friends with coaches and GMs. Each advertiser has relationships, dating back to his days of play or built throughout his dissemination career. Heck, ESPN recently acquired the NFL Network and other properties of the League, the NFL participating in the World Wide Leader within the framework of the agreement. Wrap your head around this: the media company which reports the league now has the 32 owners of the NFL among its shareholders – including, quite funny, Brady.

The boundaries between distribution partners and the league are not vague; They no longer exist.

The case of Brady is just the darter, the one with a public face. You must almost admire transparency. Brady does not pretend independence. He is a partly owner and a key decision -maker for a franchise, then he covers the other 31 teams on Sunday.

But everything that smells disabled. And it’s not on Brady. He has not violated any rule. It would be insane raiders to have the largest quarter of all time in their organization and not to have it involved in the game board. The fault lies in the NFL. How does the league allow the most visible show of its portfolio, America’s Game of the Week, to employ someone who is during production meetings with coaches and opposing players, who walks on the sidelines before kick-off, then, a week later, seated in a stand with a coach helmet?

A year ago, the NFL was established in knots to keep the role of analyst of Brady and the property of his separate looters. The firewall has since collapsed. This offseason, the League has softened its rules: Brady cannot physically enter the facilities of another team before Gameday, which means that he cannot attend team training, but he can attend virtual production calls, ask coaches and questions from players to the emissions.

The goal was that Fox tightens the chops of Brady’s broadcasting – and preventing the League from being embarrassed in one of its most watched games of the week. But when Brady asks questions in these meetings, who listens to the answer? Brady the diffuser or Brady the owner of the raiders? Can they separate the two?

Brady has already called the game of commanders and giants, and these two teams are on the calendar of raiders. Ditto for chefs and eagles, the game that Brady called in the second week. This week, he will be on the call to Bears-Cowboys. Brady’s raiders will play the Bears a week later.

Production meetings are largely a hamburger. The coaches do not reveal their game plan. They keep everything strategic or update injury as a secret of the state. There is probably nothing that Brady can take from these meetings that he cannot understand from data accessible to the public or by studying the two teams by himself.

But having brady switch between the roles still leaves a doubt about the hat he wears at any time. Does Fox’s public receive his authentic views, or a disinfected version of an owner who has the eye on a future signature or hiring? Last year, Brady could not criticize those responsible while working for Fox due to the League policy for team owners.

It would not be a big problem if Tom Brady was not Tom Brady. But it is. There is an idolatry around Brady in the NFL which does not exist for his colleagues. People to want To speak to Brady, operate his knowledge fountain and connect with the most relentless champion in sport. Maybe a conversation on the sidelines is a chance to speak to the man who won seven Super Bowls.

Brady is unable to attend the Friday training sessions, where the broadcasters see the real interior functioning of a team. But he can establish connections in the week preceding a match and cut it with players or coaches on the field before embarking on the advertiser’s stand. He is also responsible for hiring and shooting for one of the 32 teams. Last season, he called an eliminatory match featuring the Lions while interviewing the two Detroit coordinators for his own vacant coach work. If Brady speaks to a player or a coach under his appearance as a Fox diffuser, these people know that he could one day give them a job.

Perhaps nothing comes from these meetings, except fulfilling to help win a three-hour eruption. But, surely, Brady, a competitor Uber and a football scientist, can come together a few detail. It may be the body language of a trainer or an imminent free agent. There may be an overview of injuries that is not yet available to the public.

And here is the botter: if Brady doesn’t Notice anything, I did not put it to use it later, he would not do his job. Not as an analyst of Fox, taking the public inside the game; Not as a Raiders owner, trying to build a champion. These two incentives compete in a way that no league should tolerate.

Of course, if you tell Brady details on your team, it’s about you. But what happens if you are a free agent soon who sees the raiders oozing with the hood space? What if you are a young coach who likes the idea of ​​being the defensive coordinator of Vegas? Perhaps Brady’s halo effect leads you to reveal something in a five-minute conversation with whom you would not do, let’s say, Cris Collinsworth. It is a tightrope that teams and players should not have to walk.

Collinsworth, main analyst of NBC, also has a commercial relationship with the 32 franchises as the owner of Pro Football Focus. But there is no competing interests between his work outside the camera and the camera. He has no participation in a franchise, is seated on the helmet of a team or does not make personnel decisions. He has a data and software company that sells licenses to any organization that is happy to buy. The limits – and all the conflicts perceived – are clear. His work with PFF Amplifies His work for NBC.

With Brady, it’s more troubled. It would be one thing if Brady was a silent shareholder, a passive partner that the raiders deployed to seal the commercial transactions. But its fingerprints are everywhere in the franchise.

“Tom is the only one to take this organization in the future, on the football side, and perhaps my failures have successes,” said Mark Davis in September.

Brady led the committee that hired the new managing director John Spytek, a former college teammate who also worked with Brady in Tampa when the pair won a Super Bowl. Brady also interviewed chief candidates for the opening of raiders, finally settling on Pete Carroll. This is not the absent property. Thus, when Brady slips into the helmet in the Raiders stand, he is not a providential investor. It is, in the clearest possible sense, part of the football operation. Pretending otherwise requires the kind of voluntary ignorance that only Roger Goodell can bring together.

Even if nothing comes from Brady’s brain with the fox that helps raiders, perception counts as much as substance. It is Brady who seems to be above the rules, and the fracturing of fans’ confidence at a time when confidence is the main commodity of the League.

The most true was eroded because the game has become the central nervous system of the NFL. Bets are no longer just an addendum to action; It sometimes seems that he has become the only function of games. It’s everywhere: pre-match, middle of the game, opposite, on your flow, on the broadcast ticker, exploded through Redzone, radiating through each commercial break. The league has recognized that the embrace of the game requires a level of trust in fans, which is why the suspensions for players or coaches have taken the game other Sports were so serious.

To think that the NFL is scripted is something alone that your eccentric cousin evokes Thanksgiving. But there is a reason why the meme came to life, why the formulant decisions are examined and why the Brady’s firewall counts. Once the confidence of the cracks – when fans begin to suspect that initiate access could tilt the competition – all the oscillations of the building.

Allowing Brady to play both roles is a short -term convenience. The NFL wants to stay in the Brady sector, to take advantage of its cachet and the attention it attracts to dollars. When he talks, people listen. Where he’s going, the others follow. This is why Fox pays him $ 325 million and Saudi Arabia pays him $ 75 million to play Football flag.

Being the goat has its privileges. But calling games while performing a franchise should not be part of it.