smurfalarm
On the Game Day Roster
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2015
- Messages
- 433
- Reaction score
- 539
NFL's league office seems to have taken it upon itself to hold a grudge match against Brady. I am presuming that this is Brady's punishment for not immediately accepting whatever charges and punishment Goodell and his cronies decided upon, perhaps as part of a half-****ed revenge plot, or perhaps to discourage future players from fighting back against the league's charges. Of course, pursuing this is a terrible idea, because Brady is the NFL's biggest star, and there isn't even anyone in second place with Peyton retired, Brees on a mediocre team, and Rodgers underperforming. But Goodell and the NFL owners apparently have a really personal grudge against Brady, and are choosing to manage the league's resources in a way that advances that grudge rather than one that advances their own financial interests. That seems insane to me, but I guess that's why I'm not getting paid tens of millions of dollars a year to make these decisions, right?
On the other hand, ESPN doesn't have any continuing vested interest in continuing to knock Brady, because whatever negative relationship ESPN had with Brady was never personal. They have a bias, sure, but unlike the rest of this board, I don't think that they have a clear anti-Patriots bias at the organizational level, even if they do happen to have some obviously biased Jets fans running their social media and a broader pro-league bias affecting their editing decisions. But independent of those two biases, I believe that what contributed the most to the anti-Brady coverage in 2014 to 2016 is that ESPN has a clear organizational level clicks and views bias: they pursue stories that will get them a lot of attention in order to milk ratings, because that's what TV networks do. They pursued the "Brady is a cheater" narrative over the course of the last couple years to drive clicks and views. I'm not happy about that, but it probably did make short term sense for them, because it gave them an ongoing story they got to cover that drove major national interest. But now that story has played out and the content is running dry, so unlike the NFL which is still caught up in its weird personal vendetta against Brady, ESPN is pursuing a "Brady is the GOAT" narrative to drive clicks and views, for the same reason it drove the anti-Brady stories the previous two years. ESPN knows that its viewers realize there is one star burning brightest in the NFL right now, so the obvious thing isn't to keep bashing him in order to make him look bad compared to other players currently in the league, but to build him up and compare him to the stars of years past so that viewers can tune in to an interesting national discussion.
