Nothing about Tom Brady's entrance into the Las Vegas Raiders' ownership group is funnier than the handwringing about how this new conflict might affect his broadcasting duties with Fox. That one’s simple—it won't. Being an owner means he’s forbidden from doing some of the basic stuff that broadcasters do, from being critical of officiating to attending to basic pre-production duties, but Brady’s booth work always seemed like a lucrative way to kill time until this thing came along. If it means that Fox is on the hook for $37.5 million a year of Brady half-arseing his way through Falcons-Broncos, well, Fox hired Brady to be Brady. Breaking down Bo Nix for the Sunday proles was surely never the hook for him. For one thing, the cash was too good for him not to do it. For two, the appeal of the gig was surely diminished by the fact that there’s no way to prove beyond a doubt that you’re the best at it when you're stuck musing about why Bo Nix isn't.
But there's more—much, much more. Brady is not going to rest on his freshly approved ownership percentage (five percent), not by any means. He is coming in to have, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal's Vincent Bonsignore, “a much bigger role than people think in the direction of the franchise in all areas on the football side.” That's according to the ubiquitous "league source," which as we know could mean anything from Antonio Brown up to but not including Roger Goodell. It only makes sense that Brady isn't just making a passive investment here.
No, he's in it up to his eyelids, and eager to get deeper. The details of the purchase are best laid out at CNBC, but leave it said that Brady is contributing sixth-round draft choice money—with partner Tom Wagner, about $250 million between the basic team valuation and something called a "flip tax" of about 10 percent that's paid out to the other 31 ownership groups—and first-round face to a team whose current face, Mark Davis is . . . well, he’s Mark Davis.
And what we know about Mark Davis is that he will be attracted to Brady's voice and quite possibly deferential to his opinion in a way that his other ownership partners, including former Raider and Patriot Richard Seymour, would not. And because Brady is clearly not bashful in leaning into his opinion—though you wouldn’t know this from his broadcasting, to be fair—it isn't difficult to foresee a not-too-distant future in which Brady is the team's dominant architect.
Put another way: five percent, schmive percent. Brady brought to the table his name, his fame, his share of the money (we think), and an admission to Davis that he fumbled in the Tuck Rule game. In exchange, he will have Davis' ear on as many issues as he wants. If the Raiders abandon silver and black as their principal color scheme, it will be because Brady strongly suggested it—although based on Brady's general aura, beige and pewter wouldn't be all that different.
Davis has always been perceived as the league's ownership weakling, a goofball inheritor who brings less financial weight to the table than any of the league’s other 30 billionaire-powered operations. As an owner, Davis has also proven prone to being captivated by strong personalities (see Gruden, Jon). In some ways, though, he is the ideal owner—Davis knows what he doesn't know, covers the checks even if it is sometimes a bit of a strain, and then sits in his suite on Sundays wondering why his team is still what it is. He hasn't gotten in the way of the Las Vegas Aces' ability to achieve, and it is hard to imagine him being a different style of owner there. Davis is an amiable nullity, in short, and that generalized absence makes him more agreeable than most of his stronger and more brutish colleagues.
Brady, for his part, is going to be as influential on the football side as Davis lets him be, which is a slightly more oblique way of saying that Brady will run whatever he feels like running, however he feels like running it. He could be, in his own P.R.-savvy way, the next Al Davis, just to name someone else who rose from humble football beginnings to become the owner of an NFL franchise. Make of that Bizarro World parallel what you will.
Along the way, Brady will learn what Davis trumpeted as the true Raider way—"We're paranoid, is what we are in the Raiders." Whatever the coaches and quarterbacks are wary about telling him for fear that he'll blab it on Fox will end the moment he leans into them and says, "This is your boss talking now." Brady likely already knows what not to share with the outside world; in his more public-facing career on the field, he rarely let anything out that he didn't specifically want to let out. In any event, neither Antonio Pierce, Luke Getsy, Aidan O'Connell, nor Gardner Minshew will withhold anything Brady wants to know. Clout knows clout.
ESPN recently ran a story about other players turned owner, and though it wasn't a complete list—the editors omitted Mario Lemieux's longterm ownership of the Pittsburgh Penguins, for one—it was for the most part a story of silent partners. I mean, LeBron James didn't have a lot to do with Arne Slot succeeding Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, mostly because they knew more about him than he did about them. The same can’t be said of Tom Brady taking a stake in a NFL team.
And Brady did not come to Las Vegas to enhance his information gathering skills for Fox. There is better money and more power in running one football team than in talking about all 32 of them, and Fox is going to be completely fine with however Brady chooses to do the gig he is currently being paid to do. If doing it violates the tenets of objectivity, broadcast journalism, and football, let us clear this up for you: It's entertainment, it's broadcasting, it's the NFL, and journalism and objectivity ain't got nuttin' to do wid' it. Fans, by now, are used to being lied to by television and especially by the NFL. Hell, we depend on it, and bet billions every week knowing it. Brady won’t be able to do a good job as a broadcaster with the restrictions that his ownership brings, but then again that’s not really what Fox is paying him to do. They are paying him to exist in this temporal plane, and he earns his dough simply by standing next to Kevin Burkhardt and smile-grimacing through the challenge of making the Saints seem interesting.
In both gigs, Brady is there to show his face, period. His team’s repeated failures notwithstanding, there is no owner more successful or powerful than Jerry Jones, and today he is known mostly for stooping to sass-talk and threaten radio talk show guys. That's what being out front means in the modern era, and serves as an indirect reminder that Mark Davis' most enduring character trait is that he is an ace crapcatcher; being 87-128 since his father passed is objectively a more important resume point than his haircut, even if they both make more or less the same point.
Brady may well become Davis' new consigliere, but even the prospect of being the shadow director of the Raiders brings him closer to scorn than he’s ever been. We suspect Brady will never let us know much he is running the operation, just out of reputational safety concerns. But if this perpetually foundering operation suddenly becomes efficient and successful on the football side, we will see a lot of Brady smiling from a suite, watching as the credit laps at his ankles and shins, basking benevolently in the new era of glory of the Beige And Pewter.
