Just like when he was an NFL player, Tom Brady has mostly moved in silence this season as a Fox broadcaster.
The network has held him and play-by-play partner Kevin Burkhardt back from interviews, and aside from a few appearances on Fox NFL Sunday and The Herd, we mostly only hear from the seven-time Super Bowl champion in the booth.
That changed Friday when, in his new newsletter “199,” Brady went deep on his first season calling games for the NFL on Fox and why it’s the “most invigorating challenge” of his career.
Overall, Brady appears to love broadcasting precisely because he’s not great at it. The quarterback described the rhythms of his first call in Game 1 as an assault on his senses, which made him wonder how well he knew English. As the season progressed, Brady learned valuable lessons about how to fill time, evaluate success, and pace himself.
“If an NFL playbook is a Mount Everest of information, a single NFL broadcast is the entire Himalayan mountain chain—there isn’t enough time, energy or oxygen to cover it all,” Brady wrote. “And that, for me, has been the other, exciting part of the challenge: figuring out how to clearly communicate as much valuable information as possible in the short window between snaps.”
The ever-confident Brady even admitted to his critics that he was timid and spotty with his analysis because of what was happening around him.
“All of the information that was assaulting my senses every forty seconds had the effect of separating my mind from my mouth,” Brady said. “It was too much, too quickly, too soon, to process into clear, effortless, fluid language.”
Brady added that evaluating success has been the most difficult adjustment from the field to the booth. Unlike wins, losses, and rings, viewership and ratings numbers only go so far.
While Brady doesn’t write this, one can only assume the constant picking apart and criticism from websites like Awful Announcing probably made it difficult to locate his good moments and good games over the course of the season.
But heading toward his first Super Bowl on the call in New Orleans on Feb. 9, Brady is only getting better. And it sounds like he’s learned a lot.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.