Tom Brady Knew he Needed to Improve on TV. So he Channeled his ‘Quarterback’ Days

Tom Brady is on the other end of the phone line from Miami, going behind-the-scenes of his daunting rookie year as an NFL TV analyst.

During postgame review sessions of his performances, he would say:

“Why’d I say that?”

“I didn’t like that.”

“That made no sense.”

He wasn’t alone.

Considered the greatest NFL player of all time, Brady was learning a new job — with around 25 million viewers judging each syllable every Sunday afternoon — but he felt like he had training wheels on, trying to find his balance and some success as the season progressed, but never a full rhythm.

“The training wheels come off, and then you have to ride slowly,” Brady told The Athletic.

He wasn’t bad as a rookie, but he wasn’t great either. He showed some flashes, but not consistency. He would have pages and pages of notes that dulled his natural reactions. It was “TMI” — too much information.

“I used to say, ‘All the stuff I prepared, I could read from start to finish in a three-hour broadcast, and I wouldn’t get through all the information,’” Brady said.

The year ended with Fox producing a strong Super Bowl that attracted a record-setting 127.7 million viewers watching the Eagles beat the Chiefs.

Brady, though, was pedestrian. He was more bus rider than bus driver, picked up by the pros around him, as opposed to leading them.

This season, he audibled, relying less on overloading himself with outside voices and reams of notes and began scouting the teams as if he were going into sessions with his old Patriots offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels.

“I started to transition this year into, ‘Let me do more of how I did it as a quarterback,’ because that’s really where my comfort is,” Brady said. “As opposed to, ‘Let me try to prepare as a broadcaster.’”

As his second year closes, Brady has moved to the top of the analysts’ game, where he is now rightly mentioned among the best in the business as he and Fox conclude their season with the NFC Championship Game on Sunday in Seattle.

This upgraded version of Brady is what Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks and network president Brad Zager envisioned when they recruited Brady during the NFL broadcasting frenzy of 2022.

In the wake of Tony Romo’s 10-year, $180 million contract with CBS, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman left Fox for ESPN in five-year deals that totaled $165 million combined as part of what was the craziest offseason in NFL broadcasting history. It created the opening for Fox, which had already developed Greg Olsen into a future top analyst, but decided to make a run at the iconic Brady.

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