Tom Brady’s first season as a broadcaster hasn’t included many headline-generating comments from the booth. He made one on Thursday, during the Giants-Cowboys game.
Brady criticized Daniel Jones’s decision to request a release from the Giants.
“I don’t know how that whole situation went down but to think that you’d ask for a release from a team that committed a lot to you is maybe different from how I would’ve handled that,” Brady said, via Jared Schwartz of the New York Post.
The most important part of that sentence is the first nine words: “I don’t know how that whole situation went down.”
Brady should at least have an inkling. The Giants made a business decision to bench Jones, with the goal of avoiding the possibility of owing him $23 million in 2025. If he’d kept playing and if he’d suffered a serious injury, the Giants would have owed a lot of money to a player whom they intended to release after the season, ideally with no further financial obligation.
The Giants essentially found a way to renege on their full commitment to Jones, by yanking him from the lineup and putting him in bubblewrap on the practice field. They were done with him. And so he opted to dispense with the charade and ask them to do now what they planned to do later.
Frankly, Brady should know that. He covers the league for a living — a very good living, at $37.5 million per year. Business decisions get made all the time. The Giants made one, and Jones made one right back.
He’s not to blame for the outcome. The Giants are.
Ask yourself this. If Brady had ever been benched not for performance reasons but business reasons, would he have embraced getting no practice reps, with the exception of playing scout-team safety during walk-through practices?
Then there’s the fact that Brady’s willingness to undermine the commitment Fox made to him by buying a piece of the Raiders has prevented him from being involved in production meetings. He doesn’t know how the whole situation went down? Well, if he could have met with coach Brian Daboll prior to the Thanksgiving game, Brady could have tried to find out — either with an on-the-record quote or an off-the-record conversation.
Hell, he could have called Daboll, who spent nine years with the Patriots while Brady played there. At worst, Brady could have asked Daboll or G.M. Joe Schoen or co-owner John Mara about it on the field before the game.
It’s not complicated. And it’s not Jones’s fault. He didn’t quit on the Giants. The Giants quit on Jones.
It’s surprising Brady doesn’t know that. And it’s hard to believe that he would have handled the situation any differently than Jones did.