Seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady will be joining the lead NFL on FOX broadcasting team this upcoming season, starting his new 10-year contract with FOX Sports reportedly worth a total of $375 million. Brady, considered by many football fans to be among the best players to have ever taken the gridiron, has been practicing his broadcasting skills and building chemistry with his colleagues throughout the offseason. His debut will come on Sept. 8, broadcasting a Week 1 matchup between the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys alongside play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt and reporters Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi.
Brady recently attended the UFL Championship Game in St. Louis, and appeared in the broadcast booth with Curt Menefee and Joel Klatt for part of the game. In commentating live at a stadium within a broadcast booth for the first time, along with practicing from afar, Brady has gained knowledge and experience in the profession. During an in-studio appearance on The Herd, host Colin Cowherd asked Brady if he has noticed a difference in his performance upon watching the tape.
“I would say yes, and I also think there’s still so much more room for improvement,” Brady explained. “Almost like when I was a player, I never felt I did things the right way. There were games where I’d go in afterward and I’d go, ‘God, I’m the worst quarterback in the NFL. Why would they even want me to play quarterback for this team?,’ and I’m sure I’m going to feel that way here at FOX where I finish a game and I go, ‘God, I didn’t even give them what they wanted,’ and it’s a very challenging thing in your own mind.”
As he has practiced broadcasting ahead of the NFL season, Brady has asked a few people how they know if they did a good job. He feels that much of it will come down to the preparation and if he is able to execute what he has studied to give themselves the best opportunity to elicit success to the fans. Brady understands that the game itself is the show and wants to be a complementary part of the action.
“We’re there to add our take on it and our analysis, but it’s also, ‘Did we feel like we added to the broadcast?,’” Brady said, “and from my standpoint, I’m going to work as hard as I can in the process of it, as you talked about earlier, to make sure that I do deliver because I don’t want to let anyone down. I don’t want to let the people at FOX here down, and I certainly don’t want to let the great NFL fans down either.”
Cowherd mentioned that a similarity between playing football as a quarterback and broadcasting is the skill to compartmentalize and be able to quickly recall information and implement it within a situation. Furthermore, he believes that what Brady is doing is the hardest thing in sports because it requires one to be smart 200 times for eight seconds within the course of a game. It led Cowherd to ask Brady if he feels any nerves in the situation, to which he replied that he always does when performing, especially since the outcome of the contest is not guaranteed.
“You never really know how sports are going to go, which is why we all tune in,” Brady said. “We tune in because the outcomes are very unexpected, which if they’re unexpected, there’s a chance of winning and losing, and because of that, there’s anxiety and there’s nerves going into every single one of those games, so the only way that I knew how to combat the nerves and the anxiousness of the game was to prepare.”
