Report: Amazon, Fox targeting Tom Brady for NFL color analyst jobs
"There’s no reason to think Brady would want to do it. But the phone call is cheap."
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Tom Brady’s playing career in the NFL is over for now, but plenty of doubt exists over whether he’ll stay on the sidelines for good.
If he does keep his cleats hung up, a few parties apparently want to give him another way to stay in the game: putting him in the TV booth.
Andrew Marchand of The New York Post reported both Fox and Amazon intend to call Brady about filling vacant color analyst positions with their respective networks.
Those potential overtures come after ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” won a bidding war for Troy Aikman, Fox’s longtime No. 1 color analyst. Fox is now looking for a new star to pair with Joe Buck on its top NFL broadcast team. Meanwhile, Amazon is still looking for a color analyst on its Thursday Night Football team after Aikman turned them down.
Brady, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio notes, has expanded his media presence in recent years, with “The Man in the Arena” and his “Let’s Go!” podcast serving both as public platforms and retrospectives on his career over the past year. Calling a football game or two a week would, in theory, allow him to keep up with his new media and business ventures without demanding as much time as playing football would.
That said, Florio also doesn’t think getting Brady in the booth is likely.
“There’s no reason to think Brady would want to do it. But the phone call is cheap. Much cheaper than it would be to actually hire Brady,” Florio said.
On top of that, the media personality adds there’s no guarantee Brady would excel at it. Though former quarterbacks Aikman, Peyton Manning and CBS’s Tony Romo have built a solid career in media, others, like Joe Montana and Drew Brees, have struggled to find their footing in the business.
The most important impediment to “Brady the Broadcaster,” though, might be a possible return to the football field: “Plenty of people think he’ll be back, with a team other than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers” in 2022, said Florio.
With all the speculation surrounding his playing career, it might be more likely Brady’s on the field than in the announcer’s booth when the 2022 NFL season starts.
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