Move to TV booth has its challenges
Brady will have to alter his approach
LOS ANGELES — Tom Brady confirmed last week that, after his playing career is done, he will turn his attention to TV, becoming NFL lead analyst for Fox. Unquestionably, he has every quality — name, looks, resume — to break salary records and even overshadow the games he’s covering.
But everybody has to start somewhere and, if history is a guide, Brady will go through some growing pains the way every analyst does.
“People think it’s just a conversation,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, an ESPN analyst. “In the end, like acting, the talent is to make it seem natural. … There’s an art to it.”
Surely, that’s no mystery to Brady. He has spent more than 20 years answering questions on the other side of the microphone, observing how TV people and other media members do their jobs, and dispensing information — sometimes very little information — in succinct sound bites. Chances are, he’s not going to be overly nervous in front of a camera.
Some in the business were somewhat surprised, though, by the news that he’s already heading in this direction.
“Never in a million years did I think he’d be going this way,” said former NFL quarterback Rich Gannon, who first got to know Brady when they were teammates on the AFC Pro
Bowl team, then covered several of his games when Gannon was a CBS analyst and Brady was playing for New England.
“You get a sense with different people when you go around and visit with them,” Gannon said. “Some guys are curious. Peyton (Manning) was curious, he’d ask questions and stuff about the role and the job, the responsibilities, the schedule. I never got the sense Tom was even interested in that.”
Going from being an elite quarterback to someone learning a new career while under the microscope can be quite daunting.
“You go from being great at something to wondering if you’re ever going to be good at anything else,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, now an NFL Network analyst. “You have to fight that battle just like anybody else does that goes from one job to another. You have to build your confidence up and figure out who you want to be.”
Warner said it can be particularly difficult not to stomp on the toes of your onetime colleagues, to offer opinions that can bruise feelings around the league.
“That’s one of the challenges as you get into television: What am I going to be as an analyst?” Warner said. “One of the hardest things is, when you’re a guy like Tom Brady that everybody likes and you want to be liked by people, and you have to figure out how to truly analyze and be critical of what’s going on but not be critical of people.”
Reporters gravitated to Young when he was a player. He was a deep thinker and a great quote. But he says now that when he was speaking to media, his target audience was really his teammates. He had to shift his thinking when he got into TV — just as Brady will — and that’s not always easy to do.
“When Tom speaks to the press, he’s a master — like Peyton and others who were great at this, every time they spoke, they were speaking to their linemen,” Young said. “They were speaking to their teammates, trying to hold them close. Everything was about that. This is a completely different job.
“I think that’s the biggest issue Tom will have. The communication and who he’s speaking to has to change. It’s no longer a way of gathering his teammates, which has been a huge part of his success. Now you’re on TV and you don’t have that same paradigm. And that’s a real shift.”