Chris Russo wants to know who the hell cares that Tom Brady is going back to Foxborough. Fox cares, for one. Fox paid a reported $375 million for exactly that question to have an answer.
On First Take this week, Russo went after the network’s build-up to Sunday’s Packers-Patriots game, according to Pro Football Network. “Fox’s promotion all week is the fact that Tom’s going back to Foxborough; who the hell cares?” he said. Then, for good measure: “Call the game on the moon.”
He called it “the dumbest thing in the world.” He also said he was shocked at how often Fox leaned on it, claiming the network ran the promo “30 times on Sunday afternoon.” I did not count. Russo seems to have counted, or at least enjoyed saying a number.
https://x.com/TheCurrentTalk/status/2118078330226532491
To be fair to Russo, he did not blame the guy at the center of it. “It’s not Tom’s fault; he didn’t ask for this,” he said. His actual complaint is a football one. Jordan Love is playing Drake Maye, and Russo says he wants to watch “because it’s a big game. Not because Tom’s calling it.”
That is a reasonable thing to want. It is also a thing Fox is not set up to give him.
Here is the take: Russo is half right, and the half he is missing is the funny part. Brady’s Fox deal is reportedly 10 years and $375 million, and Awful Announcing laid out the plan back in May. This is Brady’s first time calling a game at Gillette, with Kevin Burkhardt next to him and Erin Andrews on the sideline. He played there from 2000 through 2019 and won six of his seven Super Bowls with the Patriots. Nobody at Fox stumbled into that storyline. They put it on the schedule.
When a network pays that kind of money for a broadcaster, the broadcaster becoming the story is the business plan. It is not an accident or a lapse in focus. The announcer is the product, and everyone in the arrangement knows it, including the guy in the booth.
Now look at where Russo said it. He said it on a talk show on ESPN, a network that has spent years turning its own talent into the programming. Nobody on First Take is offering the audience a quiet, anonymous discussion of Cover 3. The show is built on people being the story, and a clip of Russo getting loud about Brady is the kind of thing that travels. The clip of this rant has an extra cut to Stephen A. Smith at the end, per the person who posted it, which is the whole genre in one edit.
So the complaint lands, and also does not. Fox is selling a name. ESPN is selling the people complaining about Fox selling a name. Both of them are doing the same job at different volume.
The fair question is whether viewers actually care. Russo says no. Fox is betting a great deal of money that enough of them do. I think the honest answer is that plenty of people will tune in to see how Foxborough reacts to a man who spent two decades there, and most of them would deny it if you asked.
The game itself has a quarterback matchup worth watching, and Russo is right about that much. Fox just would not have built an entire week around it, because Love and Maye were never on the payroll that way.
Sunday, 4:25 p.m. at Gillette. Call it on the moon if you want. The promo will still run.
