Tom Brady's long-awaited broadcast debut raised a number of questions, but the most pressing was this: Why was anyone waiting for it?
Not because he was stiff, which he was. Not because Cowboys-Browns, the game he was given, was a crashing bore, which it was. Not even because it had been hyped for months on the twin hooks of (a) Tom Brady is special and (b) he's being paid nearly half a billion dollars to do it.
No, it all broke down because Brady worked so hard for so long to be an icon, and being an icon means never having to nuzzle up against Kevin Burkhardt.
To worship Brady as many do, the old adage "Always leave them wanting more" holds. The more you see Brady, the less he impresses. He is better for his idolators as a concept, and explaining why Deshaun Watson is a hot mess really is, as Howard Bryant of Meadowlark Media said in a Facebook post, beneath him.
Frankly, his real calling is as an owner-in-training of the Las Vegas Raiders. That's where the real money lies—where he never has to be seen except from afar, and he never has to be judged as anything but the oligarch he has always fashioned himself to be. Michael Jordan figured that out as the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, how Hornets: Even if you're dreadful at it, you can still sell for way more than you paid.
Instead, a stiff and green Brady risks overexposure and eventual repugnance by showing up each week trying to explain quarterbacking, using examples who aren't at his level without giving voice to the disdain he must surely feel at the lot of them. Even the assumption that he is chasing this media dream so he can be the next Peyton Manning feels like empty calories on a bed of pastry, and he surely doesn't want to work as hard at it as the Kelce brothers do to make half his scratch.
Brady may get better at this with more reps, and eventually he will get a game that may actually spike his metabolism better than Cowboys 33, Browns 17. But this is a job built for Greg Olsen, because Olsen wants to do it, is good at it, and wants only to be better at it for the right amount of pay. On game day, Tom Brady should be five seats away from Mark Davis, silently plotting his hostile takeover. That's what a proper icon does.
-Ray Ratto
Photo: Nick Cammett/Getty Images
