If a strength can become a weakness, then Tom Brady’s biggest weakness as a broadcaster might be that he knows too much football.
Regardless of what you think of him as an analyst, Brady knows ball. He knows it more than the audience, he knows it more than most players and coaches. And knowing how much of that knowledge to portray during the broadcast is proving to be one of the harder elements of Brady’s $375 million gig with Fox.
Brady joined the latest episode of the podcast he used to host for SiriusXM, Let’s Go with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray. And during the episode, Belichick lauded Brady’s debut in the booth for Fox, prompting the seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback to tout his emphasis on simplifying the game for fans.
“I definitely 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡 like a rookie out there. [It’s] moving 𝙛𝙖𝙨𝙩.”@TomBrady and Bill Belichick talk with @JimGrayOfficial about this crazy new world of broadcasting
🗣️ This week’s all-new Let’s Go!
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“How do way take something really complex, which is football, because there’s so many moving parts and create this simplicity for people,” Brady asked. “And I think when I’m sitting up there, so much of my commentary as I go on is going to be based on trying to make the game simple for the viewer to understand when we know it’s not simple. Anybody can get on there and talk about ‘In Cover 2, this is what you gotta do, you gotta read the high-low.’
“Yeah, that’s fun and that’s technical, but people won’t understand s*** if we do that. So we gotta find simple ways, and I’ve gotta continue to find simple ways to describe that to people who are just tuning in for three hours every week. It’s a challenge for sure. I definitely feel like a rookie out there. S*** is moving fast when I’m up in the booth, I mean there’s so many things to look at, but I’ve got a great team with me at Fox and the preparation has been really helpful.”
It very much sounded like Brady was overprepared at times during his Week 1 debut, although he already seemed more comfortable by his second broadcast for Fox. But part of the challenge for Brady is deciding what to say.
Brady undoubtedly has hundreds of things running through his brain during every play he’s watching from the booth. More than figuring out how to dumb down the information, the challenge for every game analyst is learning how to make an absorbable point using the least number of words possible. Unless there’s a break in the action, if you can’t make your point in about five seconds or less, it might not be worth making. It’s less about the complexity of the information and more about being able to share that information concisely.
[Let’s Go]
