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Fox Sports NFL analyst Greg Olsen said he has no problem with his colleague Tom Brady holding dual roles in the network’s top broadcast booth and with the Raiders as a minority owner.
“I’m not a hater. I say more power to him,” Olsen said Tuesday at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York.
On Monday night, ESPN showed Brady wearing a headset inside the Las Vegas coaching booth at Allegiant Stadium for the Chargers-Raiders game.
“If I’m the Raiders, and I have a minority owner like Tom Brady, who I have access to and he has the experience and I can pick his brain, you would be silly not to,” Olsen said. “Why would you not rely on him?”
This season, the NFL has relaxed the “Brady Rules” that restricted his access as a broadcaster during his debut campaign in 2024. Brady is now allowed to attend production meetings virtually, but still isn’t allowed inside teams’ facilities like other announcers are.
Still, a potential conflict of interest still lingers due to Brady’s dual roles.
But Olsen said he doesn’t blame the Raiders for using Brady. “What better resource,” Olsen said, “than someone who’s both financially obligated to the success of the organization and has 20-plus years of top-line experience? Why would you not pick his brain? Why would you not utilize every resource and every aspect of your organization to try to find that slight margin to be the difference between winning and losing the game?”
From Brady’s perspective, Olsen said “all of us would love to be an owner of an NFL team,” and how other teams handle his broadcasting access “is up to them.”
In a statement to FOS and other outlets, a league spokesperson said Brady violated “no policies” by sitting in the booth, and that league rules ban all electronic devices other than league-issued tablets.
The league said that Brady is still barred from other teams’ facilities, but he can interview players off-site. “As with any production meeting with broadcast teams, it’s up to the club, coach or players to determine what they said in those sessions,” the league spokesperson said.
Brady’s stint in the coaching booth elicited strong reactions across the league. ESPN’s Marcus Spears called it “abhorrent” and said that it called the league’s integrity into question.
FOS reporter Ryan Glasspiegel asked Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks about Brady’s potential conflict of interest at Tuned In.
“Not gonna answer that,” Shanks said Tuesday. “If there’s a conversation that needs to be had after last night, we’ll have it.”
Olsen said while he remains “ultra competitive” about his broadcasting career, he’s become friends with Brady, who took his spot as Fox’s No. 1 analyst. “We formed a genuine personal relationship that I value,” Olsen said.
“I can still seek to go out and reach the highest levels of this profession, and [by] no means does that mean I want it to be at the expense of Tom,” Olsen said. “And Tom wants to continue to ascend and achieve everything he wants. That doesn’t have to come at the expense of me. My success is not contingent upon Tom’s failure, and vice versa.”
As far as potentially becoming a No. 1 analyst at a different NFL TV partner, Olsen said he has “no idea what the future looks [like] within the Fox network and all the other players in the industry.”
Meanwhile, Olsen addressed the reaction to his comments last week on Wake Up Barstool about Syracuse football coach Fran Brown making his team run sprints on the field after beating UConn.
“I was shocked that a random question in a segment was trending,” said Olsen, who clarified that he was simply cosigning what Jon Gruden and Dave Portnoy were saying about the move being performative. “I’m not trying to strike hot takes,” Olsen said.
