Tom Brady knows a thing or two about playing in Super Bowls, but Troy Aikman has some advice on how to call one.
Aikman joined the latest episode of Jimmy Traina’s Sports Illustrated Media Podcast where he was asked about what advice he would offer Brady ahead of his first Super Bowl broadcast with Fox, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. Brady previously reached out to Aikman for advice during the gap year he took to prepare for his debut in the booth. And Aikman similarly thinks the best thing Brady can do is take this gap week to prepare for the Super Bowl.
“For anyone who’s played in a Super Bowl, to say that ‘Well the Super Bowl is just like any other game,’ they’ve not played in it. Because it’s not,” Aikman told Traina. “As soon as you win the championship game, you know that Super Bowl is unlike any other game that you’ll play in. And the same is true as a broadcaster. The entire day is different. When you first do your hit on the pregame or even right before you go on-air, the timing is very different. The halftime is very different. But eventually, like it does as a player, things settle in. You’re ramped up to begin, there’s a lot of adrenaline, a lot of emotion and you just try to let the game unfold and ease into it.
“With that is preparation and I think that was always the key for me as a player, it’s the key for me as a broadcaster. The more prepared I am, the better I feel about knowing both teams…When you call a preseason game, it’s a different broadcast than when you call a regular season game. When you call a postseason game, it’s a different broadcast than a regular season game. And when you call a Super Bowl, it’s different than any other game you would call as well.”
The question for Brady is how much preparation can he actually do? Somewhat hampered by the restrictions he’s under as a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, Brady is not allowed to participate in Fox production meetings with players and coaches from either team.
Of course there’s still plenty of ways for Brady to prepare. He can watch film, he can prepare jokes about the Giants, but he can’t prepare the way Aikman would prepare. The limitations might not define his broadcast, but Brady will undoubtedly lose out on at least some valuable insight by not being able to meet with the Chiefs or Eagles.
