At a sleepy NFL fall meeting, there was a topic most of the owners had on their minds—and, interestingly enough, it didn’t come up inside the meeting room during the two-day summit in Midtown Manhattan.
It’s now been about five months since Raiders owner Mark Davis and legendary quarterback Tom Brady came to an agreement for Brady to join the team as a minority owner. Brady had already gone in as a limited partner with Davis’s WNBA team, the now two-time champion Las Vegas Aces. And he’s since been around the Raiders a little, most prominently for a preseason game at Dallas.
Yet there’s been little movement on formalizing Brady’s deal with Davis.
The reason?
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“It’s got a lot of problems,” one owner told me of the agreement.
My understanding is Brady’s share of the Raiders would be around 6% of the franchise. This year, Forbes valued the franchise at $6.2 billion. So if you assume that to be a fair number, that stake of the team would be $372 million.
That’s relevant because the main source of pushback the Raiders are getting is that owners aren’t comfortable with the sale price. And as one of them explained to me, there’s no chance the league will rubber-stamp the way Brady was sold a quasi-ceremonial piece of both the Aces and Birmingham City, a second-division British soccer club that wanted the former quarterback as an investor to increase its visibility in the states.
Money is the driving force for most of the owners. More specifically, their only interest is in making sure every share of every team goes for as much as possible to boost their own teams’ valuations. And not only would a discount for Brady be counterproductive, it also wouldn’t bring much value to anyone but the Raiders.
The second piece of this is Brady’s job with Fox. On the surface, it’s easy to see why owners’ concerns would be valid. No team would want a minority owner from a rival team in its building meeting with its coaches and getting privileged information—the way most broadcasters do—simply to do their job at the level the NFL would expect of the people calling its games.
I’m not sure where this will go next, to be honest. But it tells me there’ll need to be a lot of tweaking before the larger group will entertain a more thorough discussion on the topic.
In case you’re wondering, the next league meeting is in Dallas in December.
• The Jaguars deserve a ton of credit for pulling off what they have over the past 19 days, including playing two games in London, another at home without a bye, then a Thursday night game at New Orleans. We detailed the Herculean effort it took for everyone to make it all work in this week’s MMQB, and, to me, all of it came into focus in the final four minutes of the team’s game against the Saints.
With 4:30 left, the Saints’ offense took over with the game tied at 24, having rallied from a 24–9 deficit, with a shot at a game-winning drive starting from their own 10. Instead, Jacksonville forced a three-and-out, got a nice nine-yard return from Jamal Agnew on a short punt and Trevor Lawrence (who came in with an injured knee) found Christian Kirk for a 44-yard, catch-and-run touchdown. The Jaguars held on, getting four consecutive stops from its defense on goal-to-goal snaps from the 6-yard line.
And, yes, one stop was courtesy of a Foster Moreau drop. But the next play, the 87th of the night (a Saints franchise record for most offensive snaps in a game), was one of the Jags’ best, with a fierce rush keeping Derek Carr from stepping into his throw and Montaric Brown snuffing out any chance Chris Olave had of getting to the ball in the back of the end zone.
The Jags will travel to Pittsburgh a week from Sunday, then have their bye before the Niners come to north Florida for a big one Nov. 12.
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• The Tua Tagovailoa–Jalen Hurts showdown Sunday night gave me a good chance to go back in my notes on the two 2020 draft prospects and former teammates. Tagovailoa and Hurts will, for obvious reasons, be forever linked in Alabama lore.
But when I think of the two coming out, I think of two things.
One, Hurts left Alabama with some NFL scouts believing he wasn’t a good enough passer to even play quarterback in the league, much less become a starter. What they might’ve missed—looking back at it—is just how the person Hurts is led to a major developmental jump after his transfer to Oklahoma—and that jump wound up being a harbinger of things to come. Tagovailoa, on the other hand, was a cleaner evaluation, and he’s been a lot of what he was in college.
Two, both guys have found their way to situations where coaches and front offices are building around what they specifically do well, and did so aggressively early on to take advantage of their rookie-contract windows. It just happened a little later for Tagovailoa than it did for Hurts. And that’s given both teams a clearer view of where they’re going, which is important ahead of guys becoming eligible for second contracts.
It’ll be fun to see those two lock horns (figuratively, since they actually face the defenses, not each other) Sunday night.
• The Browns have been optimistic about where Deshaun Watson is physically, and his return to the practice field Thursday was a big step. Just as important, he’s been really good at being part of the process, even at points when he knew he wasn’t going to play.
“He’s been great,” one Browns staffer said via text. “He’s working through it. Attitude is great.”
And for what it’s worth, PJ Walker told me Watson was instrumental last week in getting him ready to face the vaunted San Francisco defense.
• A funny thing about the Patriots last week: Mac Jones may have had as much rope as he has at any point in the season. And that was apparent, very simply, in their roster management ahead of the team’s loss in Vegas to the Raiders.
The Patriots dressed Malik Cunningham, for whom they’d installed packages as a gadget quarterback and receiver during the week, and designated Bailey Zappe as the team’s third quarterback. That means that for Zappe to enter the game, both Jones and Cunningham would have to leave the game due to injury. In other words, unless they were going to play Cunningham as their full-time quarterback (he’s not ready for that yet), the only way Jones was going to get benched again, by rule, was if he got hurt.
We’ll see if they handle things similarly this week. My understanding is the handling of the quarterbacks during the week was largely unchanged with the Bills on Sunday, though Cunningham took fewer reps at the position this week, with his role expected to either stay the same or be scaled back from where it was in Vegas.
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• This from Saquon Barkley, 12 days ahead of the deadline, was interesting: “Sitting here, everyone knows how I feel. Everyone knows I don’t want to get traded. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would want to get traded anywhere. It’s not an easy thing to do. You have to move. I have a family. I would love to be here. But like I said, it’s not in my control. My focus is to be the leader I can be for this team and get this thing on the right track.”
Barkley had a tough start to the season, playing behind an injury-ravaged Giants line, and his team is 1–5. Interestingly enough, he did flash Sunday night against a team that could use him. And if I’m Buffalo, I would think about throwing the Giants a draft pick for Barkley.
But if Barkley truly doesn’t want to be moved? My guess is the Giants will honor that.
• On the flip side, over the past week Jerry Jeudy has come off as a guy who might be eyeing his exit. Asked about rumors going back to the spring, Jeudy told reporters, “It doesn't affect me at all because at the end of the day, I’m still going to be the player I am. I know what I can do and I know what I’m capable of. So, trade me or [don’t] trade me. It doesn't matter because at the end of the day, I’m going to still be me.”
In the spring, the presumed price for Jeudy was a first-round pick (it was a second-rounder for Courtland Sutton). Whether Sean Payton and GM George Paton will give him up now for that, or less, remains to be seen. But, obviously, we’ll know soon.
• Upon further review, I think the change the owners voted through on coach hiring—they’ve disallowed in-person interviews for coaching candidates with NFL teams until after the divisional round—may be a little more cosmetic than anything. It does make things easier for coaches in the playoffs, leveling the playing field for them, and it also makes it more difficult for teams to hire someone until we’re two weeks past the end of the regular season (since you’d probably want to meet with your hire in-person before, you know, hiring them).
But in the end, you can still get a lot of work done during that two-week window. And if this slows down teams in hiring people, and maybe even gives them more time to contemplate firing (or not firing) coaches, then I guess that’s a good thing.
• Lots of memories of 2007 with the news in college football this week. I’ll say this—having radios in the helmets of both the guys on offense and defense has—for the most part—curbed a lot of the sign-stealing issues the league used to have. And it makes no sense that college football, flush with cash as it is, doesn’t afford its teams a similar safeguard.
• We could get a showdown of under-the-radar rookie quarterbacks Sunday, if Aidan O’Connell draws the start for the Raiders against Tyson Bagent and the Bears. Either way, Bagent will become the sixth rookie quarterback to start a game this fall, joining Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson, O’Connell and Dorian Thompson-Robinson. Which sure seems like a robust number for Week 7.
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