The Awfulies are here! Awful Announcing’s year-end celebration of the year that was in sports media kicks off with a bang with the golden microphone for Sports Media Person of the Year. Stay tuned throughout the week for our selections of the best and worst in sports media for 2024 spanning personalities, television, radio, podcasts, business, and much more.
Our staff were polled for their selections in several categories that you can check out in the coming days, so please let us know where we all went wrong. If you want to look back at results from past years, you can view our Awfulies Archive here.
This year we kick it all off with the biggest award of them all.
Sports Media Person of the Year
Several candidates were considered for this year’s award. Shannon Sharpe split from Skip Bayless and saw his career surpass that of his former foil. Sharpe landed a major role on First Take, saw his podcast empire grow, and even brushed off being caught in flagrante delicto on Instagram Live. Pat McAfee‘s (2023 Awfulies Sports Media Person of the Year) presence loomed large pretty much everywhere you looked once again, whether it was making weekly news with Aaron Rodgers, feuding with ESPN execs, or being featured on College GameDay and WWE. Elle Duncan, Andraya Carter, and Chiney Ogwumike starred throughout the year whether it was talking about men’s or women’s basketball, and gave ESPN the most acclaimed studio coverage they have received in quite some time.
On the business side, NBA rights drama was at the center of the sports media world throughout much of the year, specifically the chess match between NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav. Eventually, TNT lost the NBA but secured a decent deal from Comcast to avoid a nasty carriage fight.
And finally, newcomers to sports media were all the rage with Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, and Jason Kelce making their debuts. But there was one newcomer that stood above it all and dominated the sports media scene in 2024, much like he did on the football field for so many years.
Winner: Tom Brady
When it comes to “Person of the Year” awards, it’s always a bit of a tricky endeavor. It’s not an MVP award, nor is it given to the “best” in some trait or category. Rather, it selects the one person who was the defining figure of the year that was in any given industry. And when arguably the biggest star in modern sports history makes his broadcasting debut after signing a 10-year, $375 million contract, there are not too many other options that are really worth considering.
Fox spent just about half of a Dominion lawsuit settlement on Tom Brady successfully making the transition from GOAT athlete to GOAT sports announcer. And looking at recent history, it was a risky bet. Joe Montana, Brady’s predecessor in the that rarefied air, famously lasted less than a full season as an NBC Sports analyst in the mid-1990s.
But this was going to be different. Brady had all the tools – the personality, the look, and the success. Could you ever imagine Joe Montana hosting a Netflix roast of himself? And then he went and took an entire gap year between retirement and broadcasting to practice so that he could be as good in the broadcast booth as he was as a seven-time Super Bowl champion.
To show just how different this was going to be, Fox ran ads in the lead-up to the season not promoting their games, but Brady as one of their announcers. Given he was also replacing Emmy award winner Greg Olsen, it’s safe to say that Tom Brady’s announcing debut was the most hyped and anticipated in the history of the medium.
And then Brady’s debut came in Week 1 calling the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns and… eeeeehhhhh?
To put it bluntly, he sounded a lot more like the Giovanni Carmazzi of announcers rather than Tom Brady.
Given just how truly special he was as a player, and all the work that he told us he put in, it was downright shocking to hear Tom Freaking Brady actually sound a little bit nervous and out of his natural element. It wasn’t that Brady was actively bad necessarily, but he certainly wasn’t great.
As the season has gone on, Brady has had ups and downs. On the whole, he has gotten better. But when he got to call the Cowboys again in front of the massive Thanksgiving audience, it was more or less the same takeaway – this all sounds weird. Not good, not bad, but weird. And very expensive.
So where do we go from here in 2025 and beyond? Well, it doesn’t help Brady’s broadcast future that there is the constant elephant in the room of his part-ownership of the Las Vegas Raiders that now factors into everything he says and does as an analyst. The NFL’s infamous broadcast restrictions may be more of a red herring than anything else when it comes to his actual job performance, but it’s always going to be a constant distraction and talking point from here on out.
As for Tom Brady’s performance? He’s bound to get better and keep improving. But will he ever reach the level of his predecessor in Greg Olsen? Right now, it’s looking doubtful. And with his Raiders ownership and so many other possibilities out there, you might just say the same about him eventually finishing his 10-year contract with Fox.
Follow along with the 2024 Awfulies and see previous years’ winners here.
