Tom Brady to get Fox lead NFL analyst job

[Bob Jersey]

Once he retires.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tom-brady-join-fox-nfl-analyst-1235143765/ (link)

B

[Greg Diener]

Why do I get the feeling this is gonna be like when Joe Montana flopped on NBC? Brady has the chrisma of a wet fart whenever he's interviewed despite the press treating him like he's Jesus.

Greg

[Tom Wolper]

That’s a hell of a gamble for Fox. One of the drivers of the recent round of musical chairs of announcers came from when ESPN tried to poach Tony Romo for MNF. CBS kept him but they had to pay him $17 million a year which is more than 5 times than any other announcer made. Romo’s deal has now become standard and the networks are now evaluating their talent not at their current salaries but whether they’re worth keeping at the higher rates.

The Brady deal with Fox resets the market. So if Brady flops they not only have to pay out his contract, they will also have to pay as much to his replacement. I have no idea what due diligence Fox did before closing this deal. I know Brady did prerecorded halftime segments for MNF on Westwood One radio so he has some media experience they could evaluate.

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[David Bruggeman]

I continue to be baffled by how much the American public likes what is increasingly (to me at least) a series of soap opera stories interrupted by games that average 11 minutes of action every hour.

That said, trying to figure out the economics of all this leaves me dizzy.  If these broadcast outlets are escalating the salaries for their (mostly) interchangeable commenting teams, will they still have enough money to pay the ridiculous amounts they do for broadcast rights?  It doesn't seem sustainable to me, but American football fans resemble addicts more and more than television viewers.

David

[Adam Bowie]

What I find amazing in all this is that surely most viewers are tuning in for the game. I know when I decide to watch a sports event, it's on the basis of the fixture/match-up/event/whatever. Certainly I might prefer one commentary team over another. Indeed, I might actively dislike some commentators (announcers). But I'm still going to watch the game. They're very much secondary in sports where the action is pretty frenetic.

I will admit that they come much more into their own in slower paced sports where there are many hours to fill and not much of it is as action packed. Think of something like cricket (Test Matches run for five days!) or one of my favourite sports, cycling, where a stage might be six hours on the road.

I was listening to Matt Belloni on The Town podcast the other day talking about this, and his view is that it will all make zero difference to ratings. I guess the only thing that might happen is that NFL becomes slightly less profitable for networks - some of whom are already taking a loss on coverage since they treat it as a promotional vehicle.

One small thing was mentioned which might have an impact. There was the suggestion that employing a pricey announcing team might persuade the NFL to give you better games. Which leads to my question: who decides which games go where. When, say, Amazon buys Thursday Night Football, where is that in the pecking order of games when the fixtures are made? 

I do know that for the UK rights to the Premier League, where there are three rights holders, the packages the rights-holders have entitle them to choose the fixtures in each given week. The Premier League determines which match-ups take place in a given week (everyone plays everyone twice in a 19 game - 19 game pattern, but local considerations happen, like not having both Manchester teams at home in the same week and so on), and then the rights-holders of, say, the 4pm Sunday game which is the biggest slot, get "first pick" of fixtures perhaps 25 times a season. The right-holders of the 12.30pm Saturday slot might get the remaining first picks. And so on down the list. You bid for the slot and a set number of first/second/third/whatever choices of fixtures. Although other things come into play to ensure every team gets a certain number of TV outings. (Not every game is televised live in the UK - none of the Saturday 3pm games).

Does a similar thing happen in the US? Or does the NFL have final say on what game will be the Sunday Night one etc?

Adam

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[PGage]

So I don’t see the salary figure in the Hollywood Reporter article, but the NY Post puts  it at $375M for ten years; at an average of $37.5M/ year, that’s >2X Romo.

I have not seen the details of how the deal is structured, but you have to assume it is backloaded, such that it is much less than $37.5M for the first couple of years. I may not live long enough to know it, but would be shocked if Brady actually spends 10 years doing color commentary at Fox. I won’t be surprised if he is better than Montana (not hard, as Greg said, he was horrible), but Brady has other ways to make big bucks, and bigger fish to fry than hanging out with the Bozos at Fox Sports.

Still, this is all a reflection of the odd fact that as Linear TV ratings get smaller and smaller, the value of the NFL gets larger and larger.

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[PGage]

I am not going to defend this as a rational decision by Fox (I think it’s nuts), but I do think there is some real value to having a signature announcing crew for NFL games. I think it will show up in the ratings (not a $37.5M impact, but some measurable impact). I typically watch all of every game on every Sunday (until I started watching Red Zone some years ago, which disrupted everything), so for fans like me it would not matter who the announcers are. But there is a significant pool of potential viewers who are making week to week and game to game decisions about what and how much to watch, and the announcers make a difference for this group. This is particularly true for younger people, who are often just as happy to be playing video games or hanging out with friends and checking scores on the internet occasionally. I have read there is also some value for networks in getting high profile announcers to do special things for affiliates.

Others here know the details of how games are assigned better than I do. In general Fox Carrie’s NFC games, but there are inter conference games every week to be allocated, and the best games of any kind often go to NBC on Sunday Night. Having a high profile announcing team may help Fox a little fighting to keep their best games, but I can’t imagine this is a big component.

The biggest problem is that, while almost certainly there will initially be a ratings impact from curiosity viewing in his first few games, if he sucks at the job, whatever value he has will pretty much vanish outside of New England. But hate Tom Brady, but I assume he is knowledgeable about the game, and charismatic and funny in a jock-culture sort of way. He has demonstrated very little ability to project that on television, but maybe that will change after he is done playing. However, unlike someone like Tony Romo, who had very little to lose by letting his sort of geeky personality flag fly, Brady is unlikely to want to let it all hang out because he is more like Michael Jordan, who has a multi hundred million, maybe even billion dollar brand to protect and nurture.

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[Bob Jersey]

Only the league's schedule-making brain trust, identified along with their function in this league article, knows which network gets what games... even the Sunday day games switched between the two nets involved in them have to be equally distributed... and of course, in recent years, some of the later weeks won't be finalized till close to when they are...

https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/nfl-schedule/creating-the-nfl-schedule/ (link)     B

Adam Bowie, to David Bruggeman, Tom Wolper, Greg Diener and moi, in part, May 13th:

[Adam Bowie]

Thanks for that link - it made for interesting reading. Although someone at the NFL needs a proofreader - the paragraph on cross-flexing is repeated 😀

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[JW]

> But there is a significant pool of potential viewers who are making week to

> week and game to game decisions about what and how much to watch, and

> the announcers make a difference for this group.

I seriously doubt it. As Adam said, the teams involved are a much bigger factor; it would take two equally appealing matchups for announcers to make a difference, and even then, I'm much more likely to flip between games at commercial breaks than I am to choose one. There may be Ian Eagle fans who will go out of their way to watch his games, but I'd be shocked if that's more than a negligible portion of the audience.

I'll also mention that we see so much of the top announcing teams that they become overexposed. Hearing Buck and Aikman twice a week every week didn't make me more inclined to watch them.

Here's a brief, but more detailed, explanation of cross-flexing:

https://www.latimes.com/la-sp-ask-farmer-20141213-story.html

And I'm pretty sure there's a mechanism where CBS and Fox can protect a small number of games per season from being flexed to Sunday nights, so that, say, CBS can guarantee itself one Chargers-Chiefs game.

[PGage]

I am not referring to fans choosing between which of two or more games to watch, but fans who are choosing whether to watch a game at all or do something else and just get score updates. I think there is a significant number of these each week, though, as I say, not enough to justify that salary.

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[Bob Jersey]

Thanks right back. I mentioned that to them on social.     B

Adam Bowie, to moi, May 13th: