Certainly the leaked salary numbers — a reported total package of US$375-million over 10 years — are enough to make anyone reconsider the appeal of, say, grooming the perfect lawn and learning to play the guitar in one’s retirement, but Brady, 44, has already stretched his playing career to previously unthinkable lengths, and his first retirement did not take.
No one had begun his broadcasting career making as much of a splash as Romo, with his knack for reading formations and calling plays before the snap of the ball, but the novelty of that wizardry had already worn off by the time he was given his massive raise.
In the United States, eight of the top 10 most-watched broadcasts in 2021 were NFL games, and one of the other two was a bang-average drama that aired immediately after the Super Bowl and which garnered millions of viewers who had simply fallen asleep or passed out.
The best match up will usually get the most viewers, but no one would watch Jaguars-Texans over Chiefs-Broncos if a storm blew in and stranded Romo and Nantz in Jacksonville, the poor things.
It is possible that ESPN just decided to money-whip Aikman into a daze because, having also brought long-time partner Joe Buck to join him, they have ended literal decades of people complaining about the MNF booth.
CBS didn’t want to lose its new star in Romo, so it gave him crazy money, and now other broadcasters are doing the same thing so they don’t look less committed to the NFL, which is the only sure-thing television product in existence.
The winner in all this is NBC, which lost Al Michaels to Amazon, who poached him to be the voice of its new Thursday Night Football package.
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