Fox Sports used 'Hail Mary' to sign Tom Brady

Fox Sports shocked everyone in 2022 when it announced legendary quarterback Tom Brady had signed a massive 10-year, $375 million deal to be its lead NFL analyst.

While everyone else is focusing on Brady’s broadcast debut Sunday in the Dallas Cowboys-Cleveland Browns game, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis took a fascinating and in-depth look back at how Fox landed Brady in the first place. The pursuit went on in secrecy, with one Fox employee likening it to the Manhattan Project.

Eric Shanks and Brad Zager, two Fox executives who attended the first meeting with Brady in Los Angeles, faced a tall task, as Curtis wrote, “trying to convince Brady … to take a job he’d never shown interest in.”

How did they do it? Zager noted that Brady’s recent retirement — of course, he later returned to play the 2022 season — inspired the network to reach out.

“It was only because he was retired that we threw that Hail Mary,” Zager said (via The Ringer ).

So at that first meeting, Brady, Zager and Shanks talked. The Fox executives pulled out a surprise — a video pitching Brady on joining the network. The video included highlights from a couple of Super Bowls Brady won with the New England Patriots that Fox had broadcast.

“We were there for your first,” a narrator said, as highlights played from Brady’s 2002 Super Bowl win.

“And your most epic,” the narrator continued, as the video showed Brady and the Patriots’ historic comeback from a 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI.

The narrator kept going, asking Brady to dream of calling a future Super Bowl for Fox, and imagine what it would be like, “To build a new legacy, become the face of a network dedicated to giving you every resource possible to succeed with it.”

It would be ridiculous to suggest that highlight video made the difference in Brady’s decision to sign with Fox. That historic $375 million deal obviously looms large in that respect.

But that first meeting between Brady and the two Fox execs, who had no idea if the star would even be interested in the role, set the stage for the two months of negotiations that led to that deal .

“You’re not in that meeting hoping that he looks at you and is like, ‘I’m in,'” Zager said.

“It was our first meeting,” Brady said. “We were just getting to know each other.”

The hype video probably didn’t hurt their efforts, though. It closed with Brady saying, “You know what ring is my favorite one? My favorite ring is the next one.”

“Welcome to the next one, Tom,” the narrator concluded.

[ The Ringer ]

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