Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history (for now). He is not the greatest NFL broadcaster of all time (for now). So why is he calling the Super Bowl tonight, and why is Fox Sports paying him $375 million over 10 years—more than any other broadcaster in sports history—as if his excellence in the former job automatically qualifies him for the latter?

By the simplest conventional analysis, Brady’s initial returns make the contract look like a bad bet. His performance in the booth has received mixed reviews, to put things charitably. In a season when NFL ratings have declined overall, they fell more for games on Fox than on CBS, and more people tuned in to CBS on average to watch football than to watch Brady’s late-afternoon slot. In fairness, as Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal pointed out, the games on CBS this year happened to be closer in the fourth quarter, and many people watching Fox might have clicked away because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s contract is difficult for at least four reasons: He is not a normal person, “celebrity sports broadcaster” is not a normal job, the NFL is not a normal industry, and televised football is not a normal business.

For starters, Tom Brady is … uh, Tom Brady. (Yes, this is the high-quality analysis you come to The Atlantic for.) He is the GOAT of quarterbacks by conventional career statistics; he is also the most decorated quarterback in NFL history by championships, a part-owner of an NFL franchise, one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most annoyingly handsome people alive. If you want somebody with this résumé (or, frankly, even trace elements of this résumé) to commit to working with you for a substantial period of time, you’re going to part with a gargantuan amount of cash.

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Even when they’re not all-time talents with supermodel jawlines, NFL broadcasters are paid like kings. Al Michaels, the legendary play-by-play guy with Amazon, is reportedly paid $15 million annually. So is the nearly-as-legendary Joe Buck, at ESPN. Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who provides occasionally oracular commentary for CBS, gets closer to $17 million a year. At $37.5 million a year, Brady’s salary seems eye-bleedingly high compared with basically any job, but in the context of other famous commentators, his salary is merely eye-watering.

Nor is Brady just an NFL broadcast personality; he’s a celebrity NFL broadcaster. Celebrity television hosts are mascots, emcees, and gold-plated utility players. For example, Jimmy Kimmel is not only paid handsomely to host a late-night show; he’s also well known within Disney for being the ultimate team player who’s game to schmooze a big advertiser in a pinch or to host the Disney “upfronts,” where the networks show off their upcoming programming to advertisers and media. Fox Sports can theoretically use Brady in a similar way. For their latest IndyCar promotional campaign, Fox taped a short cameo with Brady joking about his jawline. How much marginal ad revenue will the Fox Sports analytics department assign to that one Brady spot? I have no idea, but the very possibility of being able to deploy Tom Frickin’ Brady as a corporate asset is worth an amount of money that exceeds his immediate value as a broadcaster.

There’s another way that Brady’s value to Fox Sports might be greater off-camera than on. Ratings seem more sensitive to the quality of the matchup than to the quality of the commentary from the broadcast booth. At a time when the NFL is trying to expand to streaming—sending Thursday games to Amazon and Christmas games to Netflix—Fox needs every edge it can get to negotiate the best games. Brady, who might be able to leverage his deep connections to the league in a pinch, is the rarest asset. He helps Fox present its broadcast to the league in terms that no other network can match: “We have the GOAT. They don’t.”

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Football bestrides American culture like nothing else. It is the last vestige of the defunct 20th-century mainstream and the keystone to the entire multi-hundred-billion-dollar cable bundle. Last year, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts. The previous year, football accounted for 93 of the top 100. (Election coverage and an unusually high-profile World Series accounted for almost all of the difference.) Every year, Fox Sports spends about $2 billion every year for the rights to broadcast NFL games. Tom Brady’s contract is less than 2 percent of that annual licensing fee. Because protecting the relationship with the NFL is worth tens of billions of dollars, an understandable calculation from Fox Sports could be: Does it really make sense to play moneyball with the NFL, or should we just suck it up and pay a 2 percent GOAT tax to guarantee that the most famous person from the most important cultural industry is ours for the next decade, as streaming giants threaten to crash the gates?

Look at it one way, and Tom Brady is paid almost $40 million a year to provide a television service that doesn’t seem to actually drive television viewership. But look at it another way, and you can see Brady as a corporate mascot, a brand-marketing tool, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency asset, and an affordable “tip” to pay the NFL on top of its licensing deal to secure the best football matchups, which actually do drive viewership.