When the news broke that Tom Brady had already agreed to become the lead NFL analyst for Fox Sports upon his (next) retirement from football, it immediately led to an obvious rhetorical question.
That guy really does not enjoy being a stay-at-home dad, huh?
Certainly the leaked salary numbers — a reported total package of US$375-million over 10 years — are enough to make anyone reconsider the appeal of, say, grooming the perfect lawn and learning to play the guitar in one’s retirement, but Brady, 44, has already stretched his playing career to previously unthinkable lengths, and his first retirement did not take. Evidently, he likes to have things on his calendar, even in the long term, and even if it amounts to getting paid absurd amounts to say things like “This is a big play here, Kevin,” every Sunday.
But there is another rhetorical question that this news raises, and it’s one that I cannot even begin to explain: Why do these networks want to pay their NFL analysts so much money? The economics here are truly baffling.
It’s a trend that began just a couple of years ago, when CBS gave Tony Romo more than US$17-million per year to be the extremely excitable foil to Jim Nantz. NFL analyst money had already been silly, with Jon Gruden reportedly the highest-paid ESPN employee at US$6.5-million annually to be a perfectly bland commentator, but the Romo deal was so large as to invite serious confusion. No one had begun his broadcasting career making as much of a splash as Romo, with his knack for reading formations and calling plays before the snap of the ball, but the novelty of that wizardry had already worn off by the time he was given his massive raise. More fundamentally, the question was whether Romo affected CBS’ NFL ratings at all. And the answer is: Almost certainly not.
The NFL is a monstrously successful television product. In the United States, eight of the top 10 most-watched broadcasts in 2021 were NFL games, and one of the other two was a bang-average drama that aired immediately after the Super Bowl and which garnered millions of viewers who had simply fallen asleep or passed out …
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