Two years ago, before kickoff of the NFL season, there was considerable interest in the movement taking place on football broadcast teams for television rightsholders. One of the headline moves was the lead NFL on FOX announcing duo of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman deciding to join to ESPN to call Monday Night Football. In turn, FOX Sports decided to promote play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt and analyst Greg Olsen to the lead broadcast team, ushering in a new generation on marquee matchups and special events.
After two years in which he secured Sports Emmy award victories and widespread plaudits, Olsen is moving to the No. 2 broadcast crew at FOX Sports where he will work with play-by-play announcer Joe Davis and sideline reporter Pam Oliver. The internal modification had been in the plans for two years to clear space for seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady to join the company after his retirement.
Despite his disappointment, Olsen recognized the circumstances but did not know when the outcome would be actualized. Nonetheless, he is grateful for FOX Sports in entrusting him with the esteemed broadcast position, which included calling Super Bowl LVII amid an average audience of 115.1 million viewers.
“It was a very comfortable environment for me to walk into as an inexperienced broadcaster just knowing that I was surrounded by really talented people who were really good at their jobs,” Olsen explained, “and I think that was probably the best thing I could say about the experience the last couple of years, even my first year at FOX.”
Olsen never received directions on specific topics to discuss or how to approach the job, instead being told to retain his techniques despite the larger audiences. As he contemplated his goals while on the lead broadcast team, he thought about effectively calling the game, making it interesting and surmising that people would be sad to see him go. While he is privy to other broadcasters around the league, Olsen has been steadfast towards his distinct persona and the translation of recondite knowledge to the viewing audience from his playing days.
“The complexity of the game is the beauty of it,” Olsen said. “It is why it’s such a fascinating three hours of football because there is so much going on and there’s so many decisions being made in real time. That’s what makes football so different than the other sports.”
Over his 14-year career as a tight end and subsequent broadcasting stint, Olsen has discerned that the person with possession of the football tends to get the most attention. At times though, he believes that action away from the game itself can possess interesting storylines, such as coaching decisions, analytics and other advanced situations.
“I think getting a little bit deeper and what makes the game so fun and so interesting and so complex is a little bit more of the behind the scenes, the part that the people maybe just don’t naturally follow,” Olsen said, “but hopefully during our games when we at times just kind of lead their eyes, lead the replays, lead the conversation and maybe some of these other categories, the hope is they leave watching our game and say, ‘Hey, I’ve never had someone dive into that. That makes sense.’”
Over the last several years, Olsen has made the most of every opportunity and focused on providing viewers with his best. Throughout that time, he has settled into a niche of calling games where he exhibits his strengths, an endeavor that happened organically after FOX Sports executives informed him that he should audition. That foray turned out to be alongside Burkhardt, and he ended up working with him and Charles Davis in a three-person booth in a bye week two years later as an active player. There were no discussions surrounding a similar setup in which Olsen would remain with the lead broadcasting team to form a three-person booth with Burkhardt and Brady.
“I think that’s a conversation that if it was something that was even on the table, we would have definitely leaned into and considered and talked through what the mechanics and the situation of that looks like,” Olsen said. “I’m not one to just close doors without at least knowing what’s behind them. So yeah, that’s not something I would have been opposed to by any stretch. It just never was worth much consideration just because it was never really a possibility.”
Despite the forthcoming NFL on FOX broadcast debut of Brady in early September, Olsen knows that he is working with an “A-caliber crew” and is thrilled to call several exciting matchups. Having previous experience broadcasting alongside Davis, Oliver and several members of the production team, the assimilation process has elements of comfort and familiarity.
“When you hit Week 1, you’re not kind of feeling your way through the conference room,” Olsen said. “Everyone kind of walks in like, ‘We’ve done this before. Let’s hit the ground running, and let’s go have a great Week 1 game,’ so in that regard, we’re pretty fortunate.”
A typical week for Olsen involves reading an array of local articles, listening to press conferences, watching film and synthesizing advanced analytics. The balance of quantitative and qualitative metrics has helped facilitate Olsen’s rise in the sports media business, enhancing the game by going beyond the superficial and eliciting commendatory feedback.
“I don’t want to talk about the obvious things,” Olsen said. “I don’t want to just say, ‘Hey, they run the ball 30 times a game. They’re a running team.’ I want to dive in a little bit deeper and bring that to the viewer, and you can do that through a lot of different avenues.”
Over the last several months, Olsen and Brady have spoken on numerous occasions about broadcasting and how to approach the new role. Because of Brady’s résumé and success both as an athlete and entrepreneur, Olsen is careful about giving him too much advice. One thing he would advise for any football broadcaster, however, would be preparing every week as if they were calling the Super Bowl. Brady will end his inaugural season calling Super Bowl LIX, following a similar path to Olsen in his first year on the lead crew.
“We’ve gotten to talk a lot through this process,” Olsen said. “We’ve gotten to know each other a lot better now than we did when we were just players and kind of just knew each other from being on the field. And, of course, the respect I had for him on the field goes without saying, but getting to know him off the field – getting to know him at the seminars; spending time with him on the phone; just kind of shooting the sh*t a little bit about what to expect on the job, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know him, so that’s been a fun experience.”
Although Olsen has learned more about television and the sports media business in recent years, he recognized the aptitude of his colleagues and would oftentimes leave the decisions up to them. In fact, whenever they were in meetings and there was deliberation over something the broadcast should do, he would accede to whatever Burkhardt wanted to do, possessing a pristine level of trust in his mindset.
“I always told him – I said, ‘Kevin, you steer the boat – I can talk about anything.’” Olsen recalled. “I said, ‘You just get us to a good conversation, and I will talk about it, but you know what makes good television better than I do,’ and that was such an advantage for me just to have such an experienced crew.”
Olsen would be open to opportunities to take part in alternate broadcasts or studio work, but he feels calling games in the traditional sense represents his comfort zone. A limiting factor on the live broadcasts that renders it both challenging and enjoyable is that the pace is usually dictated by the game.
Even though he looks forward to collaborating on a new NFL on FOX broadcast crew, Olsen hopes to call more Super Bowl championships. He explained that there is always due diligence as networks try to plan for future events and what will take place on the road ahead. This season, for example, the NFL is beginning a media rights deal with Netflix in which the streaming service will be the global home of two Christmas Day matchups this year to be produced by CBS Sports. Olsen acknowledged that sports media is a difficult business to predict what will come ahead and that what is known is the occupancy of lead broadcast booths for this season.
“I want to call the games that everybody’s tuning in to watch and all eyes are on the game and you’re the voice that weaves them in and out of super complex situations, super interesting, high-stress, kind of all-in environments and situations,” Olsen said. “I love that. Last year calling that run of playoff games that we had was awesome. I didn’t want it to end. I wish we could have done another week.”
Concurrent with his inclination to sustain his growth in the media business, Olsen is also involved in several external ventures. A few years ago, Olsen began a podcast with Ryan Khalil and Vince Vaughn in which they highlighted the landscape of youth sports. As they spoke to former professional athletes, coaches, mental health specialists, sports psychologists and more, they received positive feedback and determined that the project lent itself to something bigger than solely a show.
Ryan Baise, a former executive at Fanatics, connected with Olsen after listening to one of the episodes where they spoke about how the youth apparel marketplace is ostensibly disjointed. Upon realizing that they were aiming to reach the same consumer base, they agreed to build out Youth Inc., a digital media network and commerce marketplace focused on youth sports that will begin its rollout in the late fall. While the digital platform will arrive at that time, the commerce component will come online in the first half of next year. The company had a $4.5 million seed round this past May, and it has been working on compiling a content strategy to fuel customer acquisition and drive the commerce business.
“We’re still in the growing phase,” Olsen said. “We’re still kind of putting all the pieces [together], but we think with the people that we have coming on and the ones that we’re adding down the road, we think it could be a pretty interesting little market.”
Throughout his playing career, Olsen recognized that he did not have the physical prowess to defeat opponents simply through his athleticism, requiring him to compile deft knowledge and cognizance of the fundamental aspects of the game as a purported “survival mechanism.” Even though he was usually the starting tight end, he was never content in having that position and instead yearned to be the best player in the entire league.
In applying that insatiable approach to his work in sports media, Olsen desires to call marquee matchups such as Thanksgiving Day showdowns, conference championship games and the Super Bowl. There will likely be plenty of key games throughout the season he will call and thankful for the seat he currently occupies, retaining his indefatigable work ethic and perspicacious mindset no matter the schedule.
“It’s not something we’re calling around begging to get ourselves out, but through my conversations at FOX and everybody there [with whom] we obviously have a good relationship and we’re all on the same page and everything has been good, they know my aspirations have never changed, and I don’t think they would want my aspirations to change,” Olsen said. “I want to go out this year, albeit on a different crew, and my goal is that we’re the best crew in the industry, and that will always be my goal on every crew that I’m on is that when people watch games they say, ‘That’s my favorite crew.’”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
