We Must Address The Tom Brady Crisis (The Crisis Being That He Stinks)

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about Dungeons & Dragons, dating people with cancer, Katherine Heigl, and more.

Your letters:

Jeff:

Can you articulate what makes Mike Tirico so bad on SNF? He sucks so much but I can’t put my finger on it. He brings Collinsworth down with him. Al Michaels always used to make these games feel important. The combo of Mike and Cris makes SNF feel so lame.

The tragic part here is that Mike Tirico is very good at the job of play-by-play. He gets all of the players’ names right. He notes every substitution. He knows what penalty the ref is gonna call within moments of a flag being thrown. He’s a smooth talker who relays information to the viewer in a timely, professional manner. So it’s not as if this man is incompetent. The problem is his delivery. It’s like having a game be called by an animatronic puppet. Tirico may as well be telling me to secure the bar tight against my lap before the ride begins.

I could tell you that Tirico’s ascent is yet another example of how media entities prefer efficient products to good ones, but A) you’ve heard that spiel a million times before, and B) it deprives me of the chance to make fun of Mike Tirico specifically. Because this man is weird as shit, and has sexual harassment allegations in his background that make you want to hit the voting booth early. Tirico’s off-air personality is either nonexistent or repellent, so much so that his efforts to hide it during the broadcast are conspicuous. That’s a dealbreaker when you’re a play-by-play guy and your job is to establish a cozy relationship with your audience. I’m welcoming you into my home for the night. I expect you to be decent company. If you botch a name here or there, that’s fine so long as I like you.

I do not like Mike Tirico. He gives me the heeby-jeebies.

And yet, he’s proven so capable at the basics that NBC has been just like, Fuck it, let’s have him announce everything. They don’t care if he’s a robot. In fact, that’s a selling point to network brass. Tirico is boring but reliable, not unlike a McDonald’s hamburger. That’s why he’s already been tapped to be the main voice of the resurrected NBA on NBC. Am I jazzed for the league to be back on NBC? Yes. Will I get all misty hearing “Roundball Rock” as the bumper music to some shitty Eastern Conference game? Yes. Will all of that be ruined the second I hear Tirico’s voice? Yes. The man is no Marv Albert, that’s for certain. Now Marv Albert, there’s a guy who no skeletons in his closet!

Speaking of robots … Tom Brady. I watched the end of Ravens-Cowboys on Sunday and the man barely said a word during the fourth quarter, as if Fox was deliberately ordering him not to speak, lest he get in the way of poor Kevin Burkhardt trying to call the game. Brady, like Tirico, has never been accused of having a compelling personality, but it stood to reason that he’d be a perfectly good color guy. He knows more football than anyone in the world, and plenty of ex-players like Tony Romo and Greg Olsen were able to jump into the booth and excel right away. So what the fuck is wrong with Brady? How did he end up becoming Handsome Paul Maguire up there? Why is “Wow!” the only insight he can offer after a big play?

Well, one obvious reason is that Brady isn’t ALLOWED by the league to say anything interesting, due to his vanity stake in the Las Vegas Raiders. He’s not allowed to attend pre-production meetings with players and coaches, or watch teams practice during the week. Those meetings are important for on-air talent, because it gives them inside intel that they can divulge to the audience as the game progresses. John Harbaugh told us in the meeting that they were thinking about running that fake punt. We saw them run that flea flicker on Wednesday, etc. I know those asides can become grating when overused (see: Cris Collinsworth), but they’re a net good for broadcasters whose job is to tell you shit you don’t already know. Brady can’t do that.

In fact, Brady can’t say much of anything you don’t already know, because the league will penalize him if he “goes too far in criticizing game officials or other clubs (besides the Raiders),” which basically rules out any, you know, analysis he could potentially give. Brady can’t say a call was shitty. He can’t question Mike McCarthy whenever McCarthy butchers the clock. He can’t say shit, and he doesn’t have the force of personality to make up for those restrictions. It’s enough to make you appreciate all of the other color guys working today.

But he’s still Tom Brady, and he’s still getting paid $37.5 million a year by Fox to do this job. They didn’t want a guy who you and me could relate to. They just wanted the most famous football player alive on their payroll so that they could stick his face on everything. They were like, Come check out what the GOAT has to say every week! And that’s how you end up with a guy like Brady, who is more dedicated to what he can’t say than what he’d like to. Mike Tirico is similar, only with actual broadcasting talent to provide cover. These men are the byproduct of networks who prize safe announcing over good announcing, and I’m afraid I have to demand that all parties responsible be jailed.

Chris:

My wife and I have religiously followed your ranking of children’s ages from back in the Deadspin days and still check it yearly (our kid just turned eight). Now that you’ve raised one to maturity, can we get a full 0-18 ranking?

I have no idea how I ranked the ages all those years ago, and my memory is now too overstuffed for me to sort 1-18 out with any kind of exactitude. If you asked me what my daughter was like when she was seven, I’d have to scroll through Google Photos to even guess an answer. I’d be like, “Well, she was a vampire princess for Halloween that year!” That’s what happens when you’ve been in the game for as a long as I’ve been.

However, I have learned some new things since I last attempted to rank children’s ages. Three and four remain extremely low in the rankings, because kids that young are insane and in the house all day long. But I have a new champion for worst age of all: 14.

Fourteen BLOWS. Your kid is new to high school. They’re overwhelmed, overworked, and shot through with enough hormones to raise the dead. They wanna do more advanced teen shit—sex, vaping, beer—but aren’t quite sure how to do it yet. They wanna go places, but can’t drive. They wanna be independent, but still need their folks’ help for a lot of things. All of this means that your 14-year-old will be in a shitty mood all of the time. They won’t tell you why. In fact, if you ask them, “Are you OK?” they’ll shut their bedroom door in your face. Every 14-year-old is a silent ball of rage, and you can’t put them in timeout because they’re too big and strong. They’ll break out of timeout and steal your car! Terrible.

Eighteen is also brutal. My daughter’s senior year felt like a fucking decade. We had to deal with her applying to college, taking one major test after another, sneaking out with her boyfriend in the wee hours, and trying to parent her after she’d been legally emancipated. Complete pain in the ass. We couldn’t drop her off at college fast enough. When she gets home for Thanksgiving, I will hug her for 20 straight minutes.

So, with all of that new intel in mind, here is how I’d clumsily rank the ages now, best to worst:

1. 1
2. 12
3. 6
4. 10
5. 11
6. 9
7. 5
8. 7
9. 8
10. 15
11. 16
12. 17
13. 13
14. 18
15. 2
16. 3
17. 4
18. 14

Feel free to yell at me in the comments. I’m too tired to care anymore.

Jonathan:

How badly does Katherine Heigl hate that she has to name check Firefly Lane and Grey’s Anatomy in her dog food commercial?

If the check clears, I doubt she minds at all. We are still in the midst of reassessing how a great number of female stars of the 2000s were treated shabbily by the culture: Britney Spears, Anne Hathaway, Lindsay Lohan, I could go on. Katherine Heigl probably belongs in that group, given that she was rumored (emphasis on “rumored”) to be a pain in the ass on set, which then gave both the media and haters like me license to dump on her without guilt.

This woman was on the verge of megastardom, mind you. She’d parlayed her role on Grey’s Anatomy (in which she played the most annoying doctor ever to fuck a ghost) into a starring role in Knocked Up, and then to a bunch of shitty romcoms fit for young Sandra Bullock. But then everyone decided that they hated Heigl, and then she went away. Showbiz did Katherine Heigl dirty, so I’m glad if she’s at least been able to salvage some paid work out of it.

For real though, Izzy was a complete shit for brains. Awful character.

Cyrus:

I’d been casually dating a woman who goes to law school in St. Louis. About three hours after we decided to make it an actual relationship, and after she left to go back to school, I found out that I had stage 3 colon cancer. She knows, and is being great about it, but it made me think. You can’t break up with someone with cancer, but do you think she should get a pass to call off the relationship in this instance, because she didn’t know all of this upfront? What is the societal rule on this?

There would only be a definite societal rule about this if we were all living in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here in reality, you’re stuck in one of those dilemmas where every choice you make feels like a shitty one. But before I get to that dilemma, lemme just say BOOOOOOOO to your cancer. I am now at the age where friends of mine get cancer, and lemme tell you: I don’t like this cancer thing. That might be considered a contrarian take by some, but I’m not afraid to get cancelled for saying what I believe. Cyrus, I’m so sorry you got sick, and I demand that cancer leave your colon right now or else suffer my wrath.

Now, if you had been in a serious relationship with Newt Gingrich, you would have already been cut loose and cast back into the dating pool. But the woman you’re seeing appears to actually care about you, which means that you guys get to decide where to go here, and no one else. If you love each other, you’re gonna try to make it work. That doesn’t mean that it will. Some relationships, new or old, aren’t able to survive enormous life changes. But that doesn’t mean you give up before even trying. Don’t worry about some unwritten protocol out there for this shit. There isn’t one. There’s only life, kicking you in the ass (no pun intended) when you least expect it. But at least you, Cyrus, aren’t alone this time what it happened. No sense in taking that for granted.

HALFTIME!

Andy:

After reading you watched the D&D cartoon as a kid (so did I), would you try D&D as an adult? I got into it in 2017 and it's become my absolute favorite hobby. It's a fucking blast. After reading The Hike and Point B, I can easily see you being into it. 

You’d be wrong. I played D&D with my brother as a kid, but every time we’d play, I would lose interest less the 30 minutes in. I just liked drawing up characters, playing with all the wacky dice, and—most of all—perusing through the reference guides. I spent far more time reading the Fiend Folio than fighting the monsters it catalogued, same as how the only comic books I liked as a kid were the Marvel Universe ones. I loved learning the elements of the D&D universe and then playing with them alone, in my imagination. Every page of the Folio, the old Monster Manual, and Dieties & Demigods is hardwired into my brain. In fact, I bought old copies of these books off of Amazon last year because the redesigned editions are shitty and boring. I need the skilled drawing hand of Gary Gygax to appreciate how badly a stone golem could fuck me up. Also, some of the naked ladies that Gygax drew were hot. [Correction: the illustrations were made by a team of artists, not Gygax.] Don’t judge me.

There’s a chance I might enjoy playing D&D while out with a bunch of friends and baked out of my mind. But that would require me sitting for hours at a time (ow my back), talking to people (I just want my chair), and facing down the possibility of being killed by an orc before I even get to the treasure. Too many variables in there. I don’t have the energy. It could be that I’m too lame for D&D. Oh, the irony.

I do like watching the Stranger Things kids play it, though.

Aaron:

With the dearth of quarterback talent in the NFL, why doesn't the league fund a true minor league system?

They have one. It’s called college football, and it’s the perfect farm system given its cost to NFL ownership (zero). In fact, the consolidation of the power conferences will only make top prospects more prepared for the rigors of the NFL when they decide to turn pro. And, as a bonus, college football is fun to watch. If CFB went away just so that the NFL could boot up XUFL 3.6 as a training ground, that would represent a massive downgrade in terms of watchability. Do you see anyone tuning into G-League Ignite games? Of course not. I wouldn’t even know how to watch the G-League. I bet it’s on SpikeTV or something.

Jake:

As someone who attends concerts regularly, what are the most important criteria for a song opening a set?

I have to know what the song is. If you open a concert with some track I’ve never heard of, you’ve failed miserably. When I saw Motley Crue play live for GQ, they opened their set with “Saints of Los Angeles,” a song they recorded in 2008. Who the fuck wanted to hear that shit? No one goes to a Motley Crue show for NEW Motley Crue songs. Everyone in the audience was baffled. No one sang along because no one knew the words. Then the band trotted out the hits for the rest of the set and all was forgiven.

In addition, I need the opening song to be LOUD. We’re not at the slow dance phase of the show yet, so please don’t walk out onto the stage with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. I’ll smash that Gibson right over your head, Honky Tonk Man-style. I’m a member of the hair metal generation, so I need every opening number to have big riffs and even bigger pyrotechnics. And lasers. And a giant statue of Eddie. Oh, and a curtain! Remember when bands like Def Leppard would hide behind a giant curtain during the sound check, and then the curtain would drop just as the guitars were about to kick in? That was fucking sweet. Do you take sugar? ONE LUMP OR TWOOOOOOOOOOOOO?!?!?!

Michael:

Assume you and nine other people are kidnapped and locked in a room without food and have no idea when you are getting out. Would you be the first to resort to murder and cannibalism, or would you wait for someone else to make the leap first? 

Am I locked in there with nine strangers, or do I know these people? I can’t kill and eat my wife, you know. But some random guy? That I could probably work with. And yes, I’d wait for someone else to initiate the killing before I partook myself. I’m very much that sort of coward.

Nathan:

You've talked about boarding school before, but, until last week, I'm not sure if you ever identified your school as Exeter. How do people react when they find out that you went to such a prestigious place? Is Exeter's reputation well-known enough to trigger a, "Whoa, guess this guy must be rich and fancy!" response?

I’ve definitely name-dropped Exeter here before, but I’m sparing with it and have been ever since I graduated. I didn’t want people to think that I was some spoiled brat (good luck on that, Drew), so I just said I went to “high school” or “a prep school,” and left it at that. If you’ve ever met a Harvard grad, you know that this tactic is often a coy way of trying to get you to ask, “Oh, what school was that?” so that they can tear open their shirt to reveal a crimson H across their chest. But I really was embarrassed by my alma mater, and not even because they have a backlog of teacher sex scandals that would make your toes curl. Tell people you went to prep school and they might assume you’re heir to a pharmaceutical fortune (not true in my case), or that your parents didn’t like you (not true in my case).

Also, Exeter isn’t all that well known, especially away from the Northeast Corridor. It would’ve been dumb to brag about going there only to have some girl be like, “Huh, I’ve never heard of that place.” More to the point, it’s just a fucking high school. It’s not like I got to do a yearlong stint batting cleanup for the Twins. I just got to be a teenage pervert at the same school the Arcade Fire guy went to.

More important, it’s been 30 years since I graduated and private schools don’t matter if you live in a good public school district. My kids all go to public school, and my oldest got into a good college without my wife and me having to foot the bill for a prep school to get her in there. We won. Feels incredible. I’m gonna go buy a steak.

Hunter:

What's the best way to have the "great athletes from different eras" debate? Is it "the athletes time travel from the time of their athletic primes to face each other in the shadow realm," or is it "great athlete from the past is born, raised, and trained in the modern era, competing against contemporary athletes"? Like if little baby Michael Jordan was born in the year 2000 instead of 1963, would he be the best basketball player alive today, here in 2024?

There’s no wrong way to have that argument, because it’s an inherently stupid one. I don’t mean that as an insult to your question. I love me a stupid argument. It’s why I’m still on social media. It’s why this column exists. You can start an argument like MJ vs. Bron, at any time, and wring hours from it. That’s fun. Ask the First Take production staff.

The important thing is to set your criteria so that you can incorporate the biases you want incorporated. For example, we have an inside joke among the Defector staff that Bill Russell was a fraud. Put prime Russell on an NBA court right now and he’d get absolutely fucking smoked, even by the Karl Anthony-Townses of the league. Now, is that fair to Bill Russell? Of course not. You can’t just strip athletes out of context and act like their resulting, alternate dimension career is quantifiable. But that take pisses off both old people AND Celtics fans, which was the take’s objective all along. It’s also true! Ha! That’s why I’ll happily stand on that hill until I’m old and dead! Like Bill Russell! He’s dead now! Nikola Jokic would have a DAY posting up on his corpse!

Michael:

In nearly every NFL, game there’s a tackle attempt that results in an undershirt stretching for 5+ yards. Is this a new thing? Did grabbing onto old (presumably non-stretchy) shirts lead to more tackles in past seasons?

No. I’m so used to defenders ripping off shirttails that it barely registers when I see it happen anymore. And it’s been happening for years now. I first thought it was the actual jersey ripping, which would have been a hell of a trick. Then I realized it was just an undershirt and the play was remanded to the IGNORE part of my brain.

I do sometimes wonder what happens after the shirt rips. How quick can they change that shit out? Do the refs let you stay on the field if you have a party streamer trailing out from your ass? Why can’t I have an endless supply of shirts to destroy? Shouldn’t shirts be nationalized?

Ryan:

Does poor mental health enhance musical creativity? I'm married to a social worker, so I feel like a piece of shit for asking this question.

It does not. Any good artist will use whatever life experiences they have at their disposal to shape a piece of work, but there’s no mandate that those life experiences all be horrible. You can make great sad music, great joyful music, or music that bounces between those two poles regularly. All you need is ability. The rest is whatever you want to make of it. Plenty of people more renowned than I have debunked the idea of the tortured artist, in part because they don’t wanna encourage people to torture themselves for art’s sake. I don’t either. You can be happy and still spin a good tune. Just make sure the guitars are fucking huge.

Email of the week!

Michael:

Coming back to the office today from lunch I noticed two young kids about to steal my neighbor’s package from his porch. So I yelled and asked them what they were doing. These kids couldn't have been more than 11 or 12. Instead of running away, or being embarrassed, they started swearing at me and told me to buy a nicer house because mine was a piece of shit. I was blown away I didn't know what to say, so I just got in my car and left. I'm 36 and feel like I just got punked by two pre-teens. I guarantee that, when I get home tonight, I will have eggs and TP covering my "shitty house.” I hate kids. 

Damn, I would’ve pegged them for 14.