Brady’s on-field greatness guarantees nothing in TV

In another examination of Tom Brady’s Sunday debut, Jon Lewis takes a longer-term view of the Brady experiment: the stakes, the precedents and what viewers can reasonably expect.

There is no shortage of breakdowns of Tom Brady’ s TV analyst debut, including a companion piece to this article on this website . To add to the list, there was nothing so wrong with Brady’s performance (especially by the standards of a novice), but there was nothing so right about it either. It was, at times, unsure, tentative — even awkward.

Given the exorbitant money and exhaustive hype — including Brady shown among the pregame arrivals as if he was an active player — one might have expected him to spring into the broadcast booth Athena-style, fully formed. That was of course never going to happen. Instead, Brady gave the kind of performance that is adequate for a first-time broadcaster, but perhaps less so for the highest-paid analyst in TV history who will be calling the Super Bowl in February.

Watching NFL RedZone, it was not lost on this listener that Daryl “Moose” Johnston — one of the longest-tenured FOX NFL analysts — sounded far more in command during the other FOX late game, Washington-Tampa Bay. Johnston has been with Fox Sports for nearly a quarter-century, making for an unfair comparison that will likely be repeated throughout the season. Expect Brady to be regularly outshined by other, more seasoned FOX analysts as he grows into the role.

Brady’s performance did not justify the hype surrounding his debut, with his mere presence overshadowing that of “America’s team” on the FOX broadcast. It is unlikely that FOX will make such hay out of him in subsequent weeks, if only because it is simply not tenable or wise to keep that level of attention on the broadcast booth week in and week out. Nevertheless, do not expect him to blend in anytime soon. One of the most famous athletes of all time will be doing on-the-job training during the biggest games of the week. There are few circumstances that would attract more scrutiny.

That Brady will improve over time is a sure thing. There is too much invested in his success for him not to get better as the season rolls along. Whether he will improve to being worthy of the #1 slot is a different question. Had his name not been Tom Brady, the performance he gave Sunday would have been worthy of the lowest-distribution game of the weekend, Panthers-Saints. The task for FOX is to make his performance worthy of a Super Bowl. Even if that is impossible on a short timeline, merely getting Brady to the level expected of a “B” team analyst — i.e., worthy of a Wild Card, maybe Divisional, game — would be an acceptable outcome.

The best television analysts were rarely the best on the field. There are few if any true all-time greats — not just All-Stars, but those on the short list of the greatest players ever in their respective sport or position — who have even entered the broadcast booth, much less excelled therein. The list of flops is easier to assemble, including the likes of O.J. Simpson and Magic Johnson . Hockey’s “Great One” Wayne Gretzky does not count, as he occupies the relative safety of the studio (on the rare occasions when he is on TNT at all).

Michael Jordan never did television. Kobe Bryant never did traditional television, opting instead for his own productions. Peyton Manning followed Kobe’s blueprint to great success. Baseball exiled so many of its all-time greats due to steroids that few of them are in public life at all, but Alex Rodriguez — if one wants to include him among the greats — had a mediocre stint in ESPN’s broadcast booth (along with a more successful run in the FOX studio).

The best analysts on television typically had forgettable, or at the very least ordinary, careers. This writer has no mental image of Kirk Herbstreit suiting up on a football field and would need to use a search engine to create one. Cris Collinsworth was well-known as a player, but has far exceeded that level of fame during his broadcasting career. John Smoltz was a star on a playoff perennial Braves team, but nobody was going to put him in the greatest of all-time conversation. Possibly the greatest analyst of all time — John Madden — had his pre-TV success on the sidelines.

None of that is to argue that on-field success is negatively correlated with a successful media career. It is merely to say that on-field success has no bearing on having a successful media career. The amount of money Fox has spent on Brady — and the sheer amount of hype — would indicate that the mere presence of the greatest quarterback in history will benefit the network and its viewers. Time and time again that has proven not to be the case.

Perhaps the greatest player to ever go into broadcasting — even greater than Brady, if one measures purely by championships won — was Bill Russell , who during a broadcasting career with CBS and Turner never quite seemed comfortable in the booth. Like Brady in the early moments of Sunday’s game, he had a halting way of speaking that did not work well with the flow of television. His knowledge of the game was of course unimpeachable, but that does not always mean much if one is simply not well-suited to television.

The reality is that hiring the best analyst for the job is what will benefit the network and its viewers. Most viewers are not going to care who is calling the game, but they are definitely going to notice if the announcing is below par. That may not stop them from tuning in, but it will make for an unpleasant time on social media. Brady has plenty of time to improve, and also no choice but to.

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