Right now in my office, he’s getting trashed.
So is Belichick.
I guess Boston sports fans are fickle.
I thought Brady was fine. Not amazing, but fine.
I agree that he’s not worth a mega contract but I’ve definitely heard players that tried to call games and were awful. He wasn’t awful, he was just okay.
I believe the story I heard was that Romo was so good at dissecting plays when he first started because he had just been playing, and so was deep into studying defenses as part of his preparation as a quarterback.
Now that he’s away from playing the game, he doesn’t get as involved in film study, so he can’t call out plays like he used to.
I don’t buy that. Most of the observations he made wouldn’t fade away after a year or two - the game isn’t so different that you have to be THAT current. I don’t think you forget what you lived and breathed your whole life just because you’re not quite doing the same weekly routine that you used to. And it’s not like he was trying and just wasn’t as good at it - his style and content shifted significantly. I think it has to be some sort of choice/instruction.
As a counter-example, Browns quarterback from the 1980s used to call some preseason games for the Browns and had incredible insight. He was a bad broadcaster, not polished at all, but easily the most insightful actual analyst of football I’ve ever heard of any announcer. He’d predict plays, show why receivers picked different routes at the end of their key, point out all sorts of things about the blocking scheme – genuine football nerd shit, better than Romo - and he’s been out of the game for 30 years.
Well, the rumor mill claims that CBS staged an intervention to get him to be “better prepared.” So I don’t know.
My issue is he replaced someone who is much better. Greg Olsen stepped into the role and was immediately good. Not as football nerdy as Romo but also not as annoying. Much better than what I saw of Brady but admittedly I only flipped over a few times.
That’s how it used to be here. Giants at 1 and Jets at 4 or vice versa. No double headers. Contracts must have changed a while back. Now we get two games to chose from at 1 and 4.
I’m not paying extra to see all the games.
I agree but at the same time, I’m not going to stop watching because of this, either.
While I’d rather Olsen than Brady, the difference in quality isn’t going to be enough to get me to stop watching.
There’s definitely a level of commentator incompetence over which I’ll just not watch a game (the last couple of Dan Dierdorf’s seasons comes to mind here) but the reverse isn’t true. Nobody is so good that I’ll make a point of catching a game to listen to them. People watch for the product on the field. As long as the TV production does not actively detract from that, they’re just playing the margins.
Greg Olsen was really good and it was a shame that they parted with him. He was a lot better than “fine”. I agree with you 100%.
Olsen is still with Fox. They just bumped him down to the #2 booth with Joe Davis.
And he wouldn’t be the first #2 (or lower) commentator that was considerably better than the #1 guy.
He knew from the beginning what was probably going to happen. He’s handled it with a lot of grace, and he’s absolutely ready to jump back into the lead spot if/when that becomes a possibility.
Ah! Thanks. I was wondering why I hadn’t seen or heard him in some time and was worried he was gone gone.
The Guardian has a pretty brutal takedown of him: “all the pizzazz of a Friday afternoon Zoom presentation from HR.”
“How do they move the ball and get something going here?” Burkhardt asked, an issue on which the man widely considered the greatest quarterback of all time would, one assumes, have an original thought or two to offer the viewers at home. With a confident nod, Brady replied: “In order to move forward they need to stop from going backward.” Burkhardt laughed, but from the expression in his eyes you could tell he was crying inside.
…
He may have dodged a career in insurance, but unfortunately for football fans, Brady has very much not escaped having the voice of an insurance salesman. Burkhardt has a classic broadcast delivery that’s all honey; Brady, by contrast, is pure nose, and his weedy honk did nothing to allay the sense through the first minutes of Sunday’s game that, for perhaps the first time ever, the most successful quarterback of all time was feeling nervous. In that prepubescent squeak the words seemed to rush from Brady’s mouth in staccato bursts of verbiage that neither made sense on their own nor cohered into proper sentences: “Just a good example here – Parsons lining up – in different locations”.
…
Listening to these dweebily delivered hymns to organizational order it was hard to escape the sense that Brady is a real company guy, the kind of shirt-tucked-in narc who would call co-workers out for not showing up to the special “games day” employees were asked to attend on their day off.
Yesterday was Tom Brady day on the tv. Tom Brady as a game commentator; Tom Brady on the fucking commercials; at one point, during a commercial featuring Tom Brady, the network diplayed a split screen of Tom Brady smiling at the Tom Brady commercial.
I saw that and it was creepy.
I hope Brady didn’t suffer CTE. He took a lot of hits in his 20 seasons with the Patriots.
It may be another decade before it’s known. I remember Alex Karras was a NFL game commentator for many years. He seemed fine, but had CTE symptoms before he died.
I hope that he did.
A little. A little CTE. In the membrane.
Me too. I’m not a fan of his but do respect his excellence and success, and I’d never wish CTE on anyone.
Speaking of level of quarterback skill and skill in the broadcast booth, Joe Montana was one of the greatest-ever QBs while Steve Young was not, but I’d much rather listen to Young than Montana.
Agreed, but with one weird exception. I will watch the Manning cast just to watch Peyton and Eli even if I wasn’t planning on watching that game anyway. The reason I say it’s a weird exception is because I don’t think they’re particularly good at calling the game.
To be honest I will mostly try to avoid his game if there is an alternative because my wife really hates him. I don’t really pay attention to the commentators which also annoys my wife.
New drinking game. Every time Brady says the word “again” take a shot. Die by the end of the 1st quarter.
There was no alternative this week. I’ll never figure out why some weeks there are two late games and sometimes I can only see one.