One of the new voices that you will hear as an analyst on FOX’s NFL coverage this season is former USC and eight-year NFL veteran quarterback Mark Sanchez. Sanchez will be the color commentator with Kevin Kugler (play-by-play) and Laura Okmin (sideline reporter) when their season begins with 49ers vs. Lions in Week 1.
On the latest episode of the Green Light with Chris Long podcast (52 minute mark), Sanchez was asked how about the opportunity to go from doing studio work with ESPN to now being a part of the game action for FOX. He said he was nervous, but became comfortable very quickly.
Even more interesting is that Sanchez revealed that he wasn’t exactly a broadcasting free agent when the opportunity to leave ESPN came his way. He had two years on his contract at Disney, but still auditioned for multiple networks.
“I auditioned for CBS, auditioned for FOX. Boom, negotiations started with FOX,” Sanchez told Long. “I called everybody at ESPN and said this is the direction I’m going and they were great. They wished me the best and I was very appreciative to them because I knew they had prepared me for this moment…This was the right move for me.”
To prepare for this season, Sanchez says he has been watching great color commentators past and present and trying to learn how their strengths could work within the context of his personality.
“Watching old Madden clips, watching old Gruden clips. Watching Phil Simms, Tony Romo. You pick little things that you love about each of them. At the end of the day, I got to be me. I got to have fun doing it…I’m a little self-deprecating. Hopefully I have good insight on something, but I want the game to be fun.”
The other part of preparation was that Sanchez had Kugler at his house this summer to talk about their expectations for each other and they watched a Jaguars-Jets preseason game that Kugler called with Mark Brunell in which Sanchez was playing QB for the Jets.
Sanchez knows the expectations that comes with this job and that he sometimes is going to have to call out a bad performance from a player and he hopes they don’t take it personally:
“I think there is a fine art to it. Some guys are better at it than others. At the end of the day, you really got to criticize the performance and not the person. Once you start getting into the person, that’s a little out of bounds. The other thing is I try not to take anything personally as a player. Hopefully, these guys do the same thing.”
In addition to calling NFL games, Sanchez will also be doing some studio work for FS1. It will be interesting to watch the next chapter of his career as he goes from quarterback to studio analyst to taking on a new challenge and calling games from the booth.
