SI Media Mailbag: Tom Brady Conflict of Interest; NFL Streaming Issues, Pat McAfee/ESPN, More

In Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Mailbag, he answers questions about whether Tom Brady should call Raiders games, various issues with NFL Sunday Ticket and much more.

Welcome to the ninth installment of a weekly mailbag that I will be writing about the world of sports media (and anything else you want to chime in on). Please email me any questions you have to Jimmy.Traina@si.com or send them via Twitter.

It’s the middle of May, and you guys had tons of NFL questions this week. Let’s get to it.

Couldn’t disagree more with this. We are all aware that Tom Brady is now a minority owner of the Raiders, so I have no problem with him calling any of Las Vegas’s games because we know where his allegiance lies. If you’re an NFL viewer and Tom Brady is calling a Raiders game on Fox in 2024, you know going in that he won’t be entirely objective. I actually think it would be fascinating to hear him call a Raiders game just to hear how frustrated he’d become when Josh McDaniels screws something up (if McDaniels is still head coach in ’24) or how much he’d go over the top praising Jimmy G. 

The cases where we don’t know about a conflict of interest are problematic. For example, Quarterback X shares the same agent as Network Analyst Y. Or General Manager X gives scoops to Play-By-Play Person Y. Those unknown connections lead to a bias viewers have no clue about. The Brady situation, on the other hand, is straightforward.

I don’t see the NFL ever allowing single-team subscriptions. The NFL is all about protecting CBS, Fox and the local market. For example, the NFL and the networks don’t want New Yorkers shunning the Jets game on the local CBS channel so they can watch an out-of-town team on a separate package. CBS and Fox pay an astronomical amount of money for their respective packages and they don’t want single-team subscriptions, so the NFL is going to side with them on this one.

As I said in Tuesday’s Traina Thoughts, the NFL doesn’t care about 100,000 fans with tickets being affected by flex scheduling when 1) Amazon paid the NFL $1 billion for Thursday Night Football and 2) 10 million people will watch Thursday Night Football and 10 million is more than 100,000.

If RedZone is offered on cable services, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be offered on satellite as well. I don’t know whether there’s any bad blood between the NFL and DirecTV after the NFL moved Sunday Ticket to YouTube, but I’d be surprised if DirecTV doesn’t add the Scott Hanson–led version of the RedZone channel for the 2023 season.

I've been told YouTube is looking into the latency issue, but, obviously that doesn't help us right now. My guess is that come Week 1, NFL fans watching Sunday Ticket on YouTube are just gonna have to deal with the latency.

Yes, bars and restaurants will still carry NFL Sunday Ticket. You can read all about it here.

Given that ESPN has multiple channels, I’m sure they’ll just get moved somewhere else. Unfortunately, layoffs are expected to hit ESPN talent soon, so that could also be a factor in whether a show even survives to be moved.

I think ESPN’s strategy with Pat McAfee is pretty clear: Get in bed with a guy who 1) has a huge following of younger fans, 2) has fans who understand new media and 3) has amazing access to a wide array of people in the sports world. It also helps that McAfee is an NFL guy since the NFL rules everything. 

Just look at the Aaron Rodgers deal. The future Hall of Famer was never going to do a weekly interview with ESPN. But he does it with McAfee. That alone is a massive win for ESPN now that Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays will happen on their air.

I doubt it. While the game is so much more digestible thanks to the pitch clock, the factors that lead to an uptick in baseball ratings are big markets and lengthy series.

Because the people in charge at First Take and ESPN know that talking hockey won’t increase the show’s ratings.

I’m not smart enough to figure out how a show that good will end. I’ll just say that I don’t want it to end with Cousin Greg in charge of the whole shebang, which some have predicted. That would be such a weak way out, in my opinion. I’d love to see the Gerri-Karl-Frank trio somehow come out on top.

I get many more porn bots and Bitcoin spam responses to my tweets. I also can’t check to see whether most of the verified people I follow liked or retweeted any of my tweets because they all lost their blue check marks. And Elon got rid of Echofon, which was the app I used on my phone for Twitter. Other than those things, it’s still the same hellhole as always.

Huge flub by you. Nobody cares where the place mats are set up. It’s all about your body placement. If you were in a booth, you needed to be positioned just 1/4 of the way from the edge. No human being with any sense of decorum would ask you to scoot over or attempt to climb over you, thus leaving them both to sit on the other side of the booth. If you were at a table, then there’s nothing you can do because when chairs are at play, it’s every man for themself.