Kurt Warner offers advice to Tom Brady in transition to broadcasting

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the sports week involved Tuesday’s announcement that Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady will make the move to Fox to call NFL games whenever he retires as an active player. Brady may or may not have put pen to paper on a 10-year deal worth $375 million with the network, but the 44-year-old presumably has millions of reasons to speak his mind each time he’s in the booth down the road. 

Former signal-caller Kurt Warner never flirted with matching Brady’s on-the-field accomplishments during his career, but Warner is a Hall of Famer who has worked as both a studio and in-game analyst. Per Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, Warner recently discussed how Brady will have to approach his new profession whenever the seven-time Super Bowl champion decides he’s taken his final NFL snap. 

“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,” Warner explained. 

“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 added that he’s seen some take professional criticism “personally” over the years. 

“You can’t just be a nice guy and really be good in this business,” Warner added. “Now, calling games can be different than being an analyst in a studio. But at the same time, you’ve got to be able to be critical. . . . For me, I never attack a person, but I always attack a problem.”

Brady isn’t shy about the fact that he has business interests outside of football and may eventually want to have at least a partial ownership of a franchise such as the Miami Dolphins. It will be interesting to see if the GOAT does all he can to avoid making any enemies once he becomes a full-time Fox employee, perhaps as soon as this winter.