It is rare for a reporter to agree with a subject about the term: Fake news.
But Tom Brady and I are completely in sync over the internet wildfire concerning the aggregation of comments I made on Brady and his future as Fox Sports’ No. 1 analyst during the podcast I co-host with John Ourand.
As far as I can tell, a blogger named Dov Kleiman, who is based in Israel and has more than 170,000 Twitter followers, is the one who lit the match on the whole thing.
After Kleiman tweeted, “Report: Tom Brady might quit his new 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox Sports. @andrewMarchand says that right now Brady is at 51% more likely to walk away from his FOX deal before it starts, adding that it’s “’fluctuating’”
The old saying was a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. With social media, changing what someone said slightly can begin in Israel and lap around the world a couple of times and eventually the GOAT is commenting on it.
My plan was just to ignore it, even after sites, like Bleacher Report and Sports Illustrated, picked it up. At The Post, we didn’t even write a story, because there is no story at this point. (As for this column, my editor and I decided it was best to address the situation after Brady commented.)
My view on these things: I don’t work for these other sites so it is not my job to police them. While we at The Post would never put a headline to get you to read (wink, wink), Kleiman misrepresented what I said just slightly enough to make it go crazy:
This is what I said on the podcast:
“We’re a year away from when he said he’s going to potentially call games with Kevin Burkhardt replacing Greg Olson on the number one team. So next year we know it is Burkhardt and Olson. Then he has a 10-year, $375 million contract that he’s supposed to start in the 2024-25 season. We have the Brady Meter. Now we’re gonna have to bring it out more and more. It fluctuates.
“It was at 51 percent that he’s going to do it to 49 percent, with the reasoning it’s so much money, he’ll try it for a year. However, I’ve talked to a couple people recently close to Brady and I kind of feel like I’m going more 49 percent chance he does it, 51 percent chance he doesn’t. I don’t think he wants to travel that much — obviously he’s going to go private. I think Brady’s a guy who if he’s in, he’s all-in, so he’s not going to be showing up day of games like Joe Buck and [Troy] Aikman do sometimes. He’s going to be there early if he’s going to do it. So it’s going to be a [three]-day event – again – cry me a river for that type of money, for five-and-a-half months.”
It is a nice compliment for other sites to credit what you report, but, in this case, we didn’t report anything. It is my opinion. Yes, informed, but it my stupid meter, not Brady’s.
This is what is true. There are many people in the business skeptical that Brady actually does call games for Fox. He has already decided to take a year off before starting the job.
It is so much money that even for Brady it seems difficult to pass on. But, as I said and I’m sure Brady wouldn’t find this part to be “Fake News,” he wants to be around his kids and, let’s say he has the children two weeks at a time, it is difficult to be away from Friday-to-Sunday every week. And, as a rookie analyst, he is going to need to put in the work to be good.
So, as I said, it “fluctuates,” but this is my silly “Brady Meter,” a fun thing we were talking about on the pod, not his. When the Internet did its thing, I didn’t need Brady on Friday to tell me it was “Fake News.”
When it started to gain steam on Thursday, I declined to go on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Radio because, as I wrote to the producer there, “I’m going to pass on this one because this isn’t really a story. I know it has gotten pick-up, but it is because the aggregation machine got a hold of it. Appreciate you thinking of me.”
I say the same to all the aggregators. Appreciate you thinking of me, but Brady is right – at least for now – this one is “Fake News.”