Greg Olsen has carved out an impressive second act as one of sports media’s most insightful color commentators. But like many ex-players who’ve made the transition to the booth, Olsen discovered that understanding football is only half the battle when it comes to succeeding in sports broadcasting.
Turns out, live TV doesn’t care how many routes you’ve run or how well you read defenses. The booth has its own set of rules, and even 14-year NFL veterans have to start from scratch.
“The football part I always felt pretty good about,” Olsen said during a recent appearance on The Dan Patrick Show. “You know, the football part, I felt like I always understood and I saw and I really enjoy talking the game and formulating different storylines to present to the viewer, and letting them kind of unravel in real time during the broadcast. The TV part is the part I think all of us have to learn, right? You have to learn how to go in and out of commercial breaks. You have to learn how to talk to the truck… I’m still learning some of the nuance, the terminology, where all the cameras are, and I’ve gotten a lot better now, going into my fifth year.
“It’s very interesting. The football part, I feel like that’s the easy part. Making that fit into a three-hour live broadcast, talk in segments, talk in soundbites, not talking over your play-by-play, commercial breaks, ad reads. Fortunately, I’ve had great partners. I’ve had Joe Davis, who is incredible. Kevin Burkhardt before that. They handle the TV and I tell them, ‘I’ll just do the football part.’ So, I’ve been lucky in that regard.”
When you think about it, Olsen is on a play clock, too. He might have 12 seconds to break down a complex blitz package or formation shift, then hand it back to his play-by-play partner. It’s a delicate dance, one that requires knowing when to talk and when to get out of the way. But fortunately for Olsen, he’s not the first guy to get humbled by this. And he certainly won’t be the last, either.
“I understand the timing part of it, but so many guys that came through ESPN — these are legendary coaches and players — and I said, ‘You gotta understand TV,'” Dan Patrick said. “And even Rodney Harrison and Tony Dungy on Football Night in America, I said, ‘You guys are rookies. You know nothing about TV. Listen to me, and you’ll do fine. You know football, but that’s only part of the equation.’ They look at you and go, ‘You just talk.’ I go, ‘No.’ If somebody in your ear goes, ‘Hey, you got 20 seconds.’ Well, you don’t know what 20 seconds is. In real-time, playing a game, you do. Twenty seconds on TV, you’re like, ‘Uhh, I don’t know, how long am I going?’ ‘You went 42 seconds.’ You’re like, ‘I did?'”
Patrick’s been around long enough to watch plenty of big names crash and burn on TV. Even those like Tony Dungy and Rodney Harrison had to learn the hard way that football expertise doesn’t automatically translate to broadcast skills.
“You’re spot on,” Olsen told Patrick. “The voice in your ear is an adjustment. Early on in my career, the natural instinct when someone says something when you’re talking, you stop and you want to listen. Obviously, you sound silly on live television if you do that.
“To your point about play-by-play guys, there’s no such thing as a good color analyst without a good play-by-play guy. They’re the heroes of all of this. They’re professionals. They keep this train on the tracks, running, and give you the space and the breath and the leads to then talk about the things you’re interested in, or you feel good about, and you want to take the broadcast. It is more of a dance. It is a rhythm. Every game has a different cadence.”
Olsen clearly took that lesson to heart. Rather than trying to run the whole show, he’s content to handle the Xs and Os while letting his partners manage everything else. It’s an approach that’s served him well, even if it meant getting bumped when Fox decided to throw $375 million at Tom Brady for its top booth.
“So, again, the part of the experience I’ve enjoyed the most is the unpredictability of it,” Olsen said, “where you have a basic idea of the matchup, you have a basic idea of the flow of the game, but then once it’s kicked off — no different than a player — nobody can sit there and say, ‘I know exactly how this game’s going to go, and I’m going to talk about X, Y, and Z in that order.’ Chances are that’s going to be thrown upside down. And then, you have to adjust on the fly.”
Now in his fifth season with Fox, Olsen’s proven that sometimes the best way to stand out in the booth is knowing when not to. It’s a lesson more former players could probably learn from.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.