Everyone wants to cover sports media, but maybe everyone shouldn’t.
Mike Florio, “Pro Football Talk” Aggregator/Insider/Gadfly Extraordinaire, appears every Sunday night on the most-watched pregame show, NBC’s “Football Night in America,” but he fashions a bit of league police and media. Some of the things he does can be quite good.
Others, not so much.
This week, on the “Si Media With Jimmy Traina” podcast, Florio praised NBC over its rival network, Fox, regarding Tom Brady, the $375 million TV game analyst who owns a 10 percent stake in the Las Vegas Raiders.
“I’ve been with NBC for 15 years now,” Florio said. “There’s no way in hell NBC would give Tom Brady a microphone if he owns a piece of a team. They would never do it. “
Well, except when Dale Earnhardt Jr. owning cars in the Xfinity series on NBC. Earnhardt mentioned races in the league, just not his. That’s Fox’s arrangement with Brady so far.
Additionally, NBC just acquired the rights to the NBA and has had discussions with Dwyane Wade, a minority owner of the Utah Jazz, and Grant Hill, who is currently a TNT analyst and has an ownership stake in the Atlanta Hawks.
“They would never do it,” Florio told Traina. “They’d say, ‘Tom, you need to get a job.'”
When asked if this was accurate, an NBC Sports spokesperson said, “We’re not going to comment on hypotheticals.”
Florio created pro-soccer talk almost a quarter of a century ago, and it’s a pretty incredible story of how he transformed from a lawyer with a hobby to an institution that rivals the top football sites and has him front and center in a premiere studio show. But when he made a partnership with NBC, as close as he goes to the edge – and he goes further than a lot of people – he went into business with the network and its affiliates.
That puts to rest Pro Football Talk’s previous criticism of Mike Tirico at ESPN since Tirico became NBC’s franchise player. Florio, the no-star-roaring, want-to-be-all-and-all, failed to ever post about his teammate, “Football Night in America’s” Tony Dungy’s Apology of 2023 Bathrooms for Kids Who Identify as Cats. There was no feline first grader post on PFT.
“There is a fundamental difference between being a good teammate to a colleague and owning a percentage of and having an important say in the direction of a team that competes in a league that covers you,” Florio told The athletics about the comparisons between him and Brady.
None of this is to say that Florio’s general point about the inherent conflict of interest with Brady’s ownership stake in the Raiders and calling Fox has no merit. In an ideal world it’s one or the other.
In Florio’s world, Fox should have given Brady an ultimatum on his $375 million contract to broadcast games or own the Raiders. Even if you agree with Florio, Fox may not have the right to just back out of a contract.
Florio has built a lucrative business rewriting, revising and reporting NFL News. He often goes completely in. In this case he shouldn’t have done that. You know glass houses, rocks and stuff.
(Photo: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)