Shaq predicts Tom Brady will be ‘as good as Troy Aikman’

While Fox gets inundated with criticism and negative reviews of Tom Brady in the booth, Shaquille O’Neal preaches patience.

Brady has already shown improvement through his first three weeks in the booth after getting criticized for seeming overprepared, nervous, and even timid at times. But on the latest episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq , O’Neal told co-host Adam Lefkoe that Brady will eventually be as good as any analyst in the NFL.

“My advice to Tom Brady is…talk about your experience, tell stories and be yourself,” Shaq said. “It’s not that he was quiet, he’s professional. Because when you first come in, you don’t know when it’s your turn. Everybody can’t be Charles Barkley and just take over segments and blurt out and take nine minutes to answer one damn question. You gotta get used to it. So this year might be tough for him, but by the second and third year, he’s gonna be as good as Troy Aikman. Troy is really good. But Troy Aikman, when he talks about football, we believe him because we know how great Troy was, especially when Dallas was hot. Everybody knows who Tom Brady is.”

Everybody should already believe Brady when he talks football. But part of what makes Aikman great is the chemistry he’s developed with arguably the best play-by-play voice in sports. Joe Buck and Aikman are the longest-tenured broadcast in NFL history, working their 23rd season together, but it was only toward the end of their Fox tenure that they started turning a lot of their critics into fans.

It’s still going to take time for Brady to build a similar rapport with his Fox broadcast partner Kevin Burkhardt, maybe even more than the two or three years estimated by O’Neal. Recently, Aikman said it took him at least 15 years to get a feel for a broadcast . Hopefully, for Fox, Brady can get comfortable in the booth a little bit faster than Aikman claims to have because he’s only under contract for 10 years.

[ The Big Podcast with Shaq ]

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