Tom Brady’s new jobs don’t mix and the NFL must make him choose between them
The NFL can’t keep letting Tom Brady get away with living two lives.
The guy calling the Super Bowl in February also happens to be in charge of one of the 32 teams in the NFL.
That guy is Tom Brady, the greatest player in the history of the league. Since retiring from his playing days, Brady has turned his attention to multiple new ventures. One of those things was becoming a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders.
While Mark Davis is still the majority and controlling owner of the franchise, it’s no secret that Brady’s influence as a football mind and decision maker within the halls of power has grown during his time with the team.
In the week following the end of the 2025 regular season, the Raiders announced they would be moving on from Head Coach Antonio Pierce on Tuesday and GM Tom Telesco on Thursday.
Both gentlemen had just completed their first season in those roles. For Pierce, he was coming off of a handful of games coaching the team as an interim head coach in 2023, when he earned the nod as the full time head coach for just one season.
Telesco was fired by the Chargers before being hired in-division in a surprising move, and his first year with the Raiders wasn’t fireable at all on paper.
The highlights of his season of acquisitions included landing Brock Bowers, who immediately became a top-3 tight end in the entire league as a rookie, as well as two starting linemen on Day 2. While the team didn’t win many games, his tutelage as GM wasn’t the primary reason for it. A destitute roster (from before he got there) and a complete lack of serviceable QB play were the main culprits.
But the rub here isn’t that Telesco was fired, which was to unite the new coach with a new GM for stability. The point here is how with every passing major announcement coming out of Vegas, Tom Brady’s name happens to be included somehow. His influence has grown to a point of seemingly being the go-to decision maker for the franchise. It’s not crazy to think the man has the functional power of GM and owner at the moment.
That’s understandable, though unusual, for a minority owner of a franchise. But when that person is also the face of a major network’s NFL broadcast ranks, there are many clear conflicts of interest that arise.
When Brady’s ownership stake was finalized, it was announced that the NFL would keep him from visiting other team’s facilities and doing pretty much any of the standard background work that broadcast crews have to do before a game. He can’t share any first-hand insights in the booth, because he can’t actually talk to the players and coaches behind the scenes like the rest of the broadcasters in the league do.
Brady is also barred from making certain critical comments on the air, such as questioning the decisions or the referees. He has to play by the same company-man censorship rules that players, coaches, and owners have to. And he has to do it while trying to entertain millions for 3 hours every Sunday in Fox’s marquee game of the day. Including, this year, the Super Bowl.
If that sounds like it would make for some very underwhelming color commentary, you’re right! It has! But the league has to be more concerned by his influence at this point than simply holding him to the same standard other league employees are held to publicly. His proximity to the rest of the league is too much to shrug off. While he can’t officially be in any situation where he could learn inside-information about other franchises, there’s just no insulating him completely from the privileged info that broadcast teams get. And as his power within the Raiders franchise grows, that concern looms larger. The league must make him choose.
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