Tom Brady has been playing quarterback at an elite level for so long that NFL fans have grown accustomed to thinking the future Hall of Famer can do no wrong when it comes to football.
Well, Brady’s next gig might not be a walk in the park for the seven-time Super Bowl champion, even though it’s in a field where he has heaps of institutional knowledge.
Brady will join FOX Sports as the network’s lead NFL analyst whenever he’s done throwing passes. The legendary signal-caller’s football IQ obviously is off the charts, but being a successful analyst requires much more than knowing exactly what you’re talking about.
Kurt Warner, who joined the media after a Hall of Fame playing career, acknowledged as much in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“That’s one of the challenges as you get into television: What am I going to be as an analyst?” Warner told Sam Farmer. “One of the hardest things is, when you’re a guy like Tom Brady that everybody likes and you want to be liked by people, and you have to figure out how to truly analyze and be critical of what’s going on but not be critical of people.
“Everybody’s afraid of, I don’t want to offend anybody, but I also want to do my job and I want to do it really well. It’s something that I’ve struggled with, because I don’t feel as if I ever attack anybody and say, ‘This person’s terrible.’ But there are times when you go, ‘This isn’t very good. They should do this or that.'”
Warner makes a fair point, but Brady’s status might make him impervious to the aforementioned challenge. What is an NFL player to say when the greatest champion in league history criticizes their poor performance?
