“The question I would say is, having watched all four weeks, are the instincts there?”
By all accounts, Tom Brady is doing well in Fox’s lead NFL booth in his rookie season as a broadcaster.
While his debut was a little rocky, the seven-time Super Bowl champion has settled in and has a great rapport with announcing partner Kevin Burkhardt.
While he doesn’t have the exuberant personality of Tony Romo or the commentary mastery of Greg Olsen, Brady seems on his way to justifying the $375 million price tag he comes with.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of room for improvement.
The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand was a guest on this week’s SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast and the two shared their thoughts on the former NFL quarterback’s highly scrutinized work in the booth. While both felt like he was on the right track, Marchand is waiting to see if Brady becomes more instinctual while calling the game.
“I think he enjoys it. I think he enjoys the challenge. The question I would say is, having watched all four weeks, are the instincts there?” asked Marchand. “Tom Brady and guys like him dream about winning a Super Bowl, not calling a Super Bowl. So they don’t watch the game like you and I watch it. Where we’re like interested in what the announcers say, and did he do the right thing… Most of them are not watching the game like that.
“I think, Brady, it was kinda good he had that year off to kinda concentrate on this and try to learn it, but you don’t learn those [instincts]. Jimmy Traina has better broadcast instincts, I would say, than Tom Brady. Tom Brady, obviously, even though we haven’t seen it so far yet, sees the field better and can tell you what happened on every play. Now, the difference between what Peyton [Manning] has done on Mondays and what Brady has done thus far is Brady hasn’t really done that… I would expect to see that but I haven’t.
“And [Kevin] Burkhardt’s really good. Burkhardt’s leading him places but too many times you have to go to the questions to get Brady to elicit a response. And Brady, it should be from what he sees as opposed to that Burkhardt has to literally ask him a question. Ideally, you want to just lead the person there by not asking a question, they should get the cues of ‘You should go here.”
Traina countered by saying that he thinks Fox Sports has told Brady to keep things lowkey and undramatic, an assumption Marchand disagreed with and pointed to Brady’s own words before the season started.
Ultimately, Brady isn’t the disaster that critics might have hoped but he isn’t a broadcasting wunderkind either. Most first-year broadcasters would be honing these instincts on a cable channel or streaming broadcast where they could learn without a spotlight. Brady isn’t afforded that luxury and that’s just part of the $375-million gig. All signs point to Brady improving as he goes but there’s still a sense that he remains a work-in-progress in Fox’s top booth.