Credit where credit is due, Tom Brady has improved a ton in his second season in the broadcasting booth.
Things didn’t look or sound great in his first year in the Fox NFL booth. The $375-million deal that brought the seven-time Super Bowl champion to Fox seemed like a massive overspend when he debuted with concerning reviews. His call of the Super Bowl seemed to show that the all-time great quarterback didn’t have the chops to command the top booth for an NFL broadcaster.
Just as he had during his playing career, Brady quickly put in the work to not only improve but turn himself into a solid commentator.
“[No one’s] going to accuse Brady of being the modern-day John Madden anytime soon, and most would likely still consider him a tier below Fox’s current No. 2 analyst, Greg Olsen, as a pure broadcaster,” wrote Awful Announcing’s Ben Axelrod in November. “But if we’re calling balls and strikes, the 48-year-old’s vast improvement is worth calling attention to, especially considering how rare it is to have an ex-athlete of his stature on weekly national broadcasts.”
Richie Zyontz, who has been a Fox NFL game producer since 1994, the network’s inaugural season, and worked on every major property the network has televised, knows a thing or two about what makes a good broadcast. And you can consider him very impressed with Brady’s work in Year Two.
“Look, I’m inside, I’m biased… but to say he’s improved doesn’t do justice to where he is as an analyst,” Zyontz told Ryan Glasspiegel at Front Office Sports. “He’s excellent right now.”
Zyontz shared that one area where he’s seen immense improvement from Brady is in how he condenses the massive amount of knowledge he possesses into explanations of game action.
“Tom has figured out the ins and outs of television that he was struggling with last year, just being new at it. It’s a different language,” Zyontz said. “He sees so much, and TV forces you to speak about things in a very condensed period of time.
“There are parts of the game where he just takes over—getting inside the mind of Tom Brady at the line of scrimmage before a play. Anticipating, not just reacting.”
Zyontz also appreciates how Brady has moved past his tongue-tied beginnings, when he often struggled to be direct, pausing and leaving thoughts unfinished.
“Where he struggled last year was he was perfectly fine starting a thought, but sometimes he would wander and have a hard time finishing it,” Zyontz said. “This year, among the many improvements is that for one thing he’s much more relaxed. He’s figured out what he can and can’t do, adjusted his preparation, and now it’s just more fluid. Everything is more comfortable.”
In some ways, Brady was in a no-win situation, being rocketed to the front of the line and being asked to be a broadcasting superstar right away. However, he was also the beneficiary of great privilege in that opportunity, and the expectations that he prove his worth were justified. He still has a ways to go to match some of the greats, including some of his current peers, but we perhaps should have assumed that if anyone would figure out how to make it work quickly, it would be Tom Brady.