It didn’t take long for Tom Brady’s dual life as an NFL owner and broadcaster to lead to teams cheating out in the open. While Brady may have triple-promise, pinky-sweared on his mother’s life that he wouldn’t use confidential information obtained by working for Fox to alter decisions inside the Las Vegas Raiders, Troy Aikman said the quiet part out loud this week when he revealed he’d been hired by the Miami Dolphins as a “consultant.”

“I think the Dolphins were wise in understanding my relationships around the league and knowing that I have information that they don’t have or can’t get. And I think they were smart in taking advantage of that, whether it was through me or through somebody else. The Cowboys have never elected to do that, at least with me. You know, maybe they have with others,” Aikman said.

Aikman can try to throw as much flowery language at this as he wants, but he’s fundamentally talking about cheating. It might not be written into the letter of the law by the NFL, because it frankly hadn’t come up before Brady’s dual life, but we’re talking about a broadcaster using information they learned when one team considered them an impartial third party, and funneling it directly to another team for the purpose of gaining a competitive advantage.

This is the same Dolphins organization that lost its 1st round pick in 2023 and a third round pick in 2024 for having improper contact with Tom Brady when he was under contract with the New England Patriots, attempting to bring both Brady and then-Saints coach Sean Payton to South Beach. There’s a history of circumventing the rules by Miami, and this is simply their newest way of trying to gain an advantage.

All of this was enabled by Brady being the league’s golden child. Nobody else is capable of pulling off the same level of conflicted interest, because the NFL is about money. Roger Goodell didn’t want to anger a broadcast partner in FOX by demanding Brady quit his announcing gig with them, and he doesn’t want a public falling out with Brady akin to DeflateGate. So instead of making extremely commonsense rules like, I dunno, YOU CAN’T WORK FOR A TEAM AND BE A BROADCASTER AT THE SAME TIME, the league instead invented a whole bunch of bizarre workarounds so Tom could operate in both worlds. Why wouldn’t the rest of the NFL try to copy the blueprint?

There remain some with enough morals and ethics not to muddy the water. Matt Ryan quit his job with CBS when he accepted the role as president of the Atlanta Falcons earlier this year. Ryan remains in the vast minority, however, and Aikman said the quiet part out loud in this interview about why a team would want a broadcaster on the payroll. Moreover, Aikman volunteered this information, which is critical, because NFL teams don’t need to publicly divulge consultants who are on their payroll. Every single announcer in football could theoretically have a side-job with a team, and nobody would be the wiser. There’s a vested interest for everyone involved to keep these agreements private, when they should be forced to be made public in lieu of being banned all together.

Tom Brady changed the NFL as a player with his “Brady Rule,” which limited pass-rush contact on quarterbacks. Now he’s altering the league once more by getting the ball rolling on the biggest conflict of interest scandal the league has ever faced. What a “legacy.”