You can already feel Tom Brady backing off his putt.
In a recent conversation with Stephen A. Smith, Brady went wide-range on a number of topics, and almost all of it was entertaining. For those who stop paying attention to football every season once the Super Bowl ends, it turns out that Brady has spent years of downtime refining his craft as a public speaker. The man can deliver a line.
He’s a product-hawker, a positive-mindset reinforcer. He will gladly accept your contract offer to tell your corporation what it needs to do to win!
But on the subject of how this whole NFL top-analyst thing is going to go, Brady sounded more introspective while speaking with Smith than he had been previously. He suggested — in a way that seemed both thoughtful and somewhat logical — that he might pull his punches on the FOX NFL broadcasts.
Rather than let loose with his actual reaction, Brady said, he’d temper it a bit.
I mean, terrible idea. But hear him out.
“The most challenging thing is when I see something and I think ‘Oh, that was horrible,’ but I just can’t say that on TV,” Brady told Smith. “Because there are parents and there are family members, and I don’t want to always necessarily say it in that way.”
Brady went on to say that as a player, when he screwed up a sequence on the field, “I would walk to the sidelines and say, ‘You are the worst quarterback in the world. How could you possibly make that throw? That was terrible.’”
Now, though, the seven-time Super Bowl winner says, “I just don’t want to be so critical because, in some ways, I don’t necessarily know exactly what the problem was on that play…I don’t think I’m going to dial back to make something that was negative into a neutral or a positive. I think if something’s not good, I’m going to point out why it’s not good and how it could be better…The criticism of a player is different (than) the criticism of a play.”
Wow. We are a long way from the Tom Brady of playing days.
Brady doesn’t sound exactly like he’ll be slinking away from big moments. But it’s fascinating to hear him invoke considerations like players’ parents and families as reasons to sugar-coat his explanations.
As much as we can appreciate his new protective instincts, I think we’d just as soon hear the truth.
That truth, by the way, doesn’t have to be brutal. We’re talking about games, yes, but they’e games being played at the highest level in the world. There’s going to be legitimate criticism, and sometimes it will get personal because there are people involved. Those people are used to being judged, by the way. It’s part of the gig.
It is instructive to go back to Tony Romo’s first couple of years in the analyst chair. Romo could be almost over-the-top enthusiastic, but that’s because he was still thinking like an active quarterback and couldn’t help but get fired up over certain plays or sequences that he saw unfolding.
Far from being a turnoff, that sort of authenticity made Romo a broadcast star. If he’s a little less out there these days, that’s natural, too — Romo is now separated from his playing days by several years. It has been an organic change, not a forced one.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Tom Brady doesn’t figure out how to become a top-shelf analyst, but it’s fine with me if there are some rough edges in the beginning. Brady should feel free to fire up like he did as a QB. If that involves blunt criticism, so be it — it would be authentically Brady. That’s who he is at heart: demanding, with high expectations and a medium-low tolerance for second-best effort.
That’s all to the good. Precisely what NFL viewers don’t need is for Brady to feel the urge to remake himself into an ambassador for The League. There are plenty of people to do that. Dozens. Hundreds. There is no end of people willing to carry the NFL’s water.
There is a solid middle ground between the gloves-off scenario Brady described to Smith and the sort of raving, frothing hot-take universe of social media. Brady can thread that needle and still be himself — and he has to, if he really wants this to work.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
