Tom Brady is preparing fastidiously to join Fox Sports’ top NFL announce booth.
Multiple reports have come out in recent days about Brady calling various broadcasting stars to pick their brains about how to do the job.
One of the confidantes?
Fellow former quarterback Tony Romo, the color commentator for the top team on CBS.
“Just two buddies talking football,” Romo described his calls with Brady to The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch.
“I’m excited for him. Tom will exhaust every resource to be as good at this as anybody. I think me and him have similar traits in that we’re going to try and work as hard as humanly possible to be as good as we can be at anything that we care about. He’s doing that. I think it was a genius decision by him to wait a year coming out and prepare himself. He’s going to do a great job. I think he’s going to be outstanding.”
While Romo’s preparation has at times come under scrutiny, it’s not surprising that Brady has been obsessive about the details.
Over the weekend, NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero also wrote about the advice Brady has been seeking.
“He’s talked to a large group of experts in the TV business, from Erin Andrews to Stephen A. Smith and anyone in between,” the NFL insiders wrote.
“He’s also traveled out to the FOX Studios a handful of times this year, doing dry runs with Kevin Burkhardt, who is set to be his play-by-play broadcast partner on FOX’s No. 1 team. They are said to already have great chemistry, with the network looking forward to Brady taking center stage.”
Former Post reporter Andrew Marchand wrote in 2022 that Brady had inked a 10-year deal worth a total of $375 million with Fox Sports to call games alongside Burkhardt after his retirement from the NFL.
Brady took a gap year this season, and plans to enter the broadcast booth for the 2024-25 season.
Greg Olsen, who has done a fantastic job with Burkhardt on the top team the last two years after Joe Buck and Troy Aikman left for ESPN, is expected to move to the second team alongside Joe Davis.
It is widely believed in sports media circles that Olsen would be very likely to get the top NFL color commentator job on another network in the event one becomes available.