NFL players might not care about Tom Brady’s dual role, but CBS analyst Adam Archuleta sure does.
A few days after The Athletic published a survey showing that 84.2% of players are fine with Brady serving as both Fox’s lead NFL analyst and a Raiders minority owner, Archuleta took to social media to offer a lengthy response on why those players were missing the forest for the trees.
“Players say they don’t care, but Tom absolutely has an advantage that no other owner gets,” Archuleta wrote. “It’s not stealing plays. It’s the access — talking ball with players and coaches week after week, guys who could end up on your team someday.”
The first advantage, according to the former St. Louis Rams safety, is the ability to evaluate players for free agency.
“I can tell you in one conversation if a guy’s a locker room plus, someone I’d WANT on my team,” he explained
That information becomes invaluable when free agency rolls around because most teams have to wait until the legal tampering period to start conversations with potential free agents, and even then, those conversations are limited and formal. Brady gets informal, candid conversations with players every single week throughout the season. The information he picks up about personalities, work ethics, and how someone fits in a locker room is exactly the kind of thing teams spend considerable time trying to figure out before making contract offers.
The coaching access is even more significant, according to Archuleta.
“ESPECIALLY with coaches — that’s the biggest edge,” he wrote.
During the season, NFL coaches operate within their own organizations and can’t freely exchange ideas with their counterparts on other teams. As Archuleta put it, coaches can’t “talk ball with coaches from other staffs — they’re competing, so they stay in their bubble.”
Every week during the season, broadcasters move from one team to another, sitting in on meetings and conversations that give them insight into how different organizations approach everything from game planning to roster construction to player development. A head coach can’t call up an opposing offensive coordinator to discuss scheme, but a broadcaster gets to see how all 32 teams operate.
The NFL has implemented some restrictions to address the conflict of interest. Brady was initially barred from production meetings when he joined Fox as an analyst, though the league lifted those restrictions in August. He remains banned from visiting team facilities and can’t communicate with team personnel during the business workweek.
Even so, those conversations that happen on gamedays and pregame still offer meaningful insight, particularly for someone with Brady’s experience and institutional knowledge.
“I don’t really know all the tampering rules,” Archuleta added in a follow-up. “I just personally believe that doing this job for 7 years has given me an incredible amount of insight into all aspects of running an organization. Big discrepancy between the 32 teams.”
So far, none of that theoretical advantage has shown up in the standings. The Raiders finished the 2025 season with the worst record in the NFL, prompting one player to tell The Athletic, “If he’s getting information and sharing it with the Raiders, so what? They sucked anyway.”
That’s a fair point. Whatever advantage Brady may have through his broadcasting work hasn’t shown up in the win column. But whether that edge eventually translates into wins for the Raiders — and whether players and coaches start guarding their words more carefully around him — remains to be seen.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.