Greg Olsen is getting screwed

Greg Olsen joined the Dan Patrick Show yesterday, and he was pretty honest about not feeling great that Tom Brady is going to bump him from the No. 1 slot on Fox broadcasts of the NFL. There’s also the little nugget that slotting down the No. 2 team is going to cost Olsen some $7 million a year. Hard to take lying down.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Brady is acceptable or better at the job. On the rare occasions he’s been left to just speak about the ins and outs of the game he’s pretty good at spelling things out clearly. That doesn’t mean he needs to be automatic in the role, or why Fox thinks they need the biggest name possible when their ratings are already through the roof and pay him a ridiculous amount of money to do so when Olsen is already doing the job as well as possible.

This has become something of an arms race between the networks, though it’s unclear why. People are going to tune into the NFL if Statler and Waldorf were doing the game (and that’s an experiment worth trying). But once CBS got the recently retired Tony Romo, and everyone seemed to ignore how awful he was at the job, and then ESPN chased down Buck and Aikman, and Amazon had to have Al Michaels, everyone’s gotta have a toy. Olsen is merely good at the job, really good, but that doesn’t move the needle, even if that needle only exists in Fox executives’ heads.

Olsen is certainly getting screwed, and he’s far better at the job than Romo and likely to be better than Brady. Like many people, he’s getting beaten out by someone with greater name recognition and that’s it simply for the sake of it. But hey, that’s showbiz.