LET’S TRY TO STAY AWAY FROM A SNARLING TOM BRADY AND A CRABBY BURKE MAGNUS
Brady won't realize he’s the most cartoonish conflict of interest in the media, which is saying something, while an ESPN boss called us “laughable” for insulting his hire of a 23-year-old influencer
The flight to Paris is in 10 days. My mother just died at 89, as I wrote yesterday. The food of Pittsburgh is tasty but shouting Ozempic. I would like something interesting to happen in sports media, my chosen profession, and yet, I was greeted by bombastic comments from the legal firm of Thomas Brady Burke Magnus.
We combine the names of two men, neither of whom is sure what he’s doing. One makes by far the most money in sportscasting history while the other is a leading boss at ESPN. Tom Brady might be a bigger all-time shill than his status as the greatest quarterback ever. He continues to broadcast football and converse with competing franchises about football, while continuing to serve as a boss of the Las Vegas Raiders and speak to coaches through a headset at games. He is a walking, talking, breathing, cajoling and shockingly cartoonish conflict of interest, using “competitive” as his daily ballgame.
He is joined by Burke Magnus, who just hired a 23-year-old blonde named Katie Feeney as ESPN’s newest star because she has 14 million social media followers. If I dropped my pants, I would have 15 million social media followers. Would Magnus hire me? No, he likes Feeney because she’s good for the eyeballs of twentysomethings.
I have ripped Thomas Brady and Burke Magnus.
Here they come, after me and others.
“I love football. At its core, it is a game of principles,” Brady wrote grimly this week in his newsletter. “And with all the success it has given me, I feel I have a moral and ethical duty to the sport; which is why the point where my roles in it intersect is not actually a point of conflict, despite what the paranoid and distrustful might believe. Rather, it’s the place from which my ethical duty emerges: to grow, evolve, and improve the game that has given me everything.”
Ethical, he said. How does he have a moral and ethical “duty” when he was suspended four games for deflating balls as a thrower of balls? How is Brady ethical when many NFL insiders doubt his designs? He is referring to us as “paranoid and distrustful” when we are the ones who covered his deceitful act? I was not happy when the New England Patriots were hit by Deflategate and Spygate. I had to cover it, so readers and viewers understood it. Brady thinks we have sociological issues when, in fact, I might send him to a shrink.
“People who are like that, particularly to a chronic, pathological degree, are telling on themselves,” Brady wrote. “They’re showing you their world view and how they operate. They’re admitting that they can only conceive of interests that are selfish; that they cannot imagine a person doing their job for reasons that are greater than themselves. (These kinds of people make horrible teammates, by the way.)”
To his credit, he could take his $375 million from Fox and run. At least Brady explained himself, but only a fool would believe it. He’s actually a fool for writing it. Simply, he should quit Fox and serve the Raiders. He cannot do both, or the criticism against him carries on.
Magnus does not have to use Feeney throughout the network. A sideline reporter in college football, maybe. Instead, she is everywhere. When he works for Jimmy Pitaro — who works for Bob Iger, who is on the warpath with Donald Trump — maybe executives grow desperate in Bristol.
“She’s remarkable. I’ve gotten to know her a little bit. I think we might [hire another social media influencer) in the not-too-distant future because of the great start that Katie is on,” Magnus told The Athletic. “We’ve thrown her right into the fire and this is, I guess, the poise that she gathered by building her own profile independently on her own at such a young age, but she’s already been on-location at College GameDay, at Monday Night Football, at Sunday and Monday Countdowns. She’s essentially curating SportsCenter on Snapchat for us. She’s been great. This is the world we live in.”
The reaction, on social media and in our world, hasn’t been live-in awesome. Magnus is firing back. “I’m in my late-50s. And not that I’m an expert on it, but I have an appreciation for what matters to sports audiences — particularly younger sports audiences,” he said. “This matters. I don’t care what you say. And when I read articles or criticisms or things about how we’re sort of compromising ourselves by a hire like this, it’s just to me, like, laughable. She is so relevant with an audience that is not insignificant and very important to the future of our business. It’s such an investment in both the present, but more importantly, the future, that it baffles me that people wouldn’t understand why we did it.”
Laughable? I’m not hiring a 23-year-old to do pro and college football at ESPN. And I’m not promising a long network future for Pat McAfee, as Magnus also said.
I’m going to Paris. Why?
To get away from Thomas Brady Burke Magnus.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.