Marchand: NBC’s Mike Florio is wrong in his Fox criticism about Tom Brady

Everybody wants to cover sports media, but maybe everyone shouldn’t.

Mike Florio, “Pro Football Talk” aggregator/insider/gadfly extraordinaire, is on the most watched pregame show, NBC’s “Football Night in America,” every Sunday night, but he fashions himself a little bit of the league’s and media’s police. Some of the stuff he does can be pretty 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 is no way in hell NBC would give Tom Brady a microphone when he owns a piece of a team. They would never do it.”

Well, except when Dale Earnhardt Jr. owned cars in the Xfinity Series on NBC. Earnhardt called races in the league, just not his own. That has been Fox’s arrangement with Brady so far.

On top of this, NBC just acquired the rights to the NBA and has had talks with Dwyane Wade, a minority owner of the Utah Jazz, and Grant Hill, who currently is a TNT analyst and has an ownership stake in the Atlanta Hawks.

“They would never do it,” Florio told Traina. “They would say, ‘Tom, you’ve got to pick a lane.’”

When asked if this is accurate, an NBC Sports spokesperson said, “We’re not going to comment on hypotheticals.”

Florio created Pro Football Talk almost a quarter century ago, and it is 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 on a premiere studio show. But when he made a partnership with NBC, no matter how close he goes to the edge — and he goes further than a lot of people — he went into business with the network and its relationships.

With that, Pro Football Talk’s past criticism of Mike Tirico at ESPN has vanished since Tirico became NBC’s franchise player. Florio, the no-holds-barred, will-aggregate-everything-and-anything, failed to ever post about his teammate, “Football Night in America’s” Tony Dungy’s 2023 apology after commenting on the myth that litter boxes were being put in school bathrooms for children 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 co-worker and owning a percentage of and having a significant voice in the direction of a team that competes in a league that you are covering,” Florio told The Athletic on the comparisons between him and Brady.

All this is not to say that Florio’s overall point about the inherent conflict of interest with Brady’s ownership stake in the Raiders and calling out Fox doesn’t have merit. In an ideal world, it is one or the other.

In Florio’s world, Fox should have given Brady an ultimatum on his $375 million contract to broadcast games or go 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, opining and reporting NFL news. He goes all-in a lot of times. In this case, he shouldn’t have. You know glass houses, rocks and all.

(Photo: Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)