Like many across sports media, Nick Wright is enticed by the prospect of Tom Brady’s broadcasting debut in the NFL on Fox booth.
And it’s not just because Brady is now his colleague, with weekly appearances on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Wright is genuinely invested in Brady’s success, hanging on every word during his on-air discussion with Cowherd, which revolves around his football analysis and how he breaks down the game.
“I did something wholly unprofessional today, under the guise of complimenting and congratulating, my friend,” Wright said on The Colin Cowherd Podcast. “This is the moment when Colin’s show went to break when I knew for a fact that he was within arm’s distance of Tom Brady, and I assumed all of our bosses; I made the most opportunistic FaceTime call of my life.
“I FaceTimed Colin because I knew he was with Brady, and I’m like, ‘This might be my best chance.’ Because, if I’m being honest, you said you had a few cameos in one of Brady’s documentaries. I damn near deserve royalties for how often I was featured in saying, ‘The end is nigh,’ and then he’d win a championship. And so, I was hoping to maybe be like, ‘Hi, Tom. Would love to have you on the show sometime, but either way, glad you’re a teammate.’ And Colin graciously answered the call while he was basking in the afterglow of 30 minutes of Tom, but I didn’t get that chance.”
And while he didn’t get that chance, Wright got the chance to sing Brady’s praises after his latest interview with Cowherd.
“It made me really excited for how he’s gonna call games,” Wright said of Brady. “Because there is this school of thought amongst some people that think the play-by-play and the color commentator is almost an overstated importance job because people are watching the game; people want to see the game. And I understand in a lot of instances, it doesn’t matter who’s calling the game.
“But I found myself just in this interview being like, ‘Oh, I really want to learn about how he processed and how his mind works when it comes to playing the quarterback position.’ And the stuff he was saying about how he would react to a different defensive look and the pregame prep it took, all of that. And it made me super excited to hear him in real-time watch a football game.”
Wright described himself as an “elite football watcher,” meaning he thinks he’s in the top one percent of the world at watching a game and noticing things.
“And to be able to watch a game that Tom’s watching and commenting on, and see how many times, like, what he said, ‘Oh, I was thinking something similar,’ or ‘I had that wrong.’ I’m really excited for it,” Wright said. “…I also think a uniqueness of it is so much of his superpower was his processing…But so much of Tom, ‘I out-thought, I out-prepared.'”
