“If he messed up, he would figure out how to get the job done in the meeting room.”
Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, and Julian Edelman all work at Fox. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Tom Brady might be the greatest of all time out on the football field.
But the seven-time Super Bowl champion’s transition to the broadcast booth has been a bit bumpier.
Brady is in the midst of his first year serving as Fox’s lead NFL analyst during game broadcasts. It was a risky move by the network, with Fox reportedly handing Brady a 10-year, $375 million contract to call games — even though Brady has no experience in that field.
The results have been mixed during Brady’s first foray into broadcasting, with longtime Boston sports scribe Bill Simmons calling out the former Patriots QB’s work in the booth earlier this month.
“Brady’s not teaching us anything,” Simmons noted on his own podcast, adding: “I think he’s being poorly produced is where I’ve landed, because I think whatever they’re telling him to do, it’s not working. None of it feels genuine to me. And then on top of that, [Brady] owns a piece of [the Las Vegas Raiders], and it feels like he can’t be as critical maybe as he wants to be in certain spots.”
For Simmons, the top critique against Brady has been his unwillingness to dive deep into real-game situations and offer insight gleaned from a Hall-of-Fame career — while also taking him to task for a stiff, buttoned-up approach.
“I would actually do [Julian] Edelman. I think you put Edelman in there,” Simmons said of adding another voice to the booth alongside Brady. “He needs something to loosen himself up, but they’re not going to do it because they don’t want to admit defeat, and he’s hosting the Super Bowl and they’re paying him this crazy number. “It’s just not good.”
While Simmons has not been a fan of Brady in the booth, he does have a supporter (albeit an unsurprising one) in longtime teammate Rob Gronkowski.
Speaking ahead of “The Tradition” awards event at TD Garden last week, Gronkowski backed Brady going through the expected growing pains that come with transitioning careers in pro sports.
“I love seeing Tom out there,” Gronkowski said. “I mean, the guy has made tremendous improvement from week one to whatever week it is now. And that’s Tom for you. I mean, whatever the guy is going to do, he’s going to succeed. And even if he starts off a little rocky, I mean, anyone’s going to start off a little rocky when it’s your first time ever in history doing such a thing and putting it all out on the line in front of millions of people, and he’s just grown tremendously like you’ve never seen before.
But that’s Tom’s work ethic. That kind of translates. That’s how he was on the football field. If he messed up, he would figure out how to get the job done in the meeting room, see what he did, make the corrections, and go back out on the practice field and develop as a player and not make the same mistake. So if he just carries what he did on the football field and in meetings to his next phase of his life, which he’s doing, he’s going to be a complete success.”
It doesn’t necessarily come as much of a surprise that Gronkowski would have Brady’s back. Beyond their history on the football field, both also work at Fox alongside another Patriots teammate in Edelman.
The Patriots’ two-decade run of dominance has opened the door for many standouts in Foxborough to transition to a career in the media. Along with Brady, Gronkowski, and Edelman at Fox, both Rodney Harrison and Devin McCourty are at NBC — while other players like Rob Ninkovich have made multiple appearances on podcasts and other media avenues.
For Ninkovich — who introduced Gronkowski as part of Wednesday’s festivities — some of the appeal of bringing in ex-Patriots to talk football comes from the buttoned-up mindset that became commonplace in Foxborough during Bill Belichick’s tenure.
“When I was a player, I was probably a little more — ‘Do your job’ — blah, blah, blah. All that stuff. Now you can kind of be yourself. But that’s a part of being a professional athlete, you’re not giving opponents inside information on what you’re about to do. So just part of the game when you’re playing.
“We have a lot of experience,” Ninkovich added. “And when you play for the Patriots for a long time and you win a lot of football, you’ve got a lot of stories.”