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Tom Brady and Kevin Burkhardt drew rave reviews in their call of Packers-Bears on Fox Saturday night, with many viewers remarking that Brady has improved from last season.
NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport wrote that they were “excellent on the call.” Play-by-play broadcaster Al Pawlowski tweeted, “Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady have really done a nice job on this Bears-Packers game. Sincere enthusiasm, strong analysis, and most importantly, not making it about themselves. They’ve let the game breathe.”
Inside Fox, Brady is also getting his flowers.
“Look, I’m inside, I’m biased… but to say he’s improved doesn’t do justice to where he is as an analyst,” legendary Fox NFL producer Richie Zyontz told Front Office Sports. “He’s excellent right now.”
While Zyontz of course has his own interest in Brady being seen as a success story, his bona fides give his praise credibility. He’s been working on NFL games for over 40 years, and came up through the Bob Stenner/Sandy Grossman production tree on games called by John Madden and Pat Summerall (as did top Fox NFL director Rich Russo). Zyontz has been the lead producer on eight Super Bowls, and worked on seven others.
Zyontz paints the bond between Brady and play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt as one of the major factors. “With Kevin and Tom, their chemistry is real. It’s not phony or a made-for-magazine-article phoney-baloney story,” he said.
Nevertheless, he acknowledges that Brady had some room to grow from his first season.
“Tom has figured out the ins and outs of television that he was struggling with last year, just being new at it. It’s a different language,” Zyontz said. “He sees so much and TV forces you to speak about things in a very condensed period of time.”
One area where Brady has improved from last season was that his analysis did not often enough clue you into what made him such an accomplished quarterback on the field—when the games went into crunch time and other competitors can get bogged down, he was under total control. Some of that was on display during the two-minute drill last Saturday night, as the Bears squandered an extra time stoppage by not completing a field goal attempt prior to the two-minute warning.
While the Bears wound up recovering an onside kick, an 8% probability that ultimately rendered the issue moot, we could still sense the command of the clock and processing speed that Brady would have had were he quarterbacking the drill.
“There are parts of the game where he just takes over—getting inside the mind of Tom Brady at the line of scrimmage before a play,” Zyontz said. “Anticipating, not just reacting.”
Here, Zyontz also gave credit to Burkhardt for giving Brady the space to expound.
“He’s got a partner that’s just so comfortable with him that there are times Tom will just take over,” Zyontz said. “We knew he was going to be great at that. As he’s gotten more comfortable, he just dominates those game management situations. Who would you rather hear from than Tom Brady in those situations?”
Early last season, one of the issues Brady struggled with was communicating in fully-formed sentences. There were areas where he paused and the analysis felt stilted. FOS’s Michael McCarthy called Brady’s debut “shaky” but pointed to signs he’d improve.
“Where he struggled last year was he was perfectly fine starting a thought, but sometimes he would wander and have a hard time finishing it,” Zyontz said. “This year, among the many improvements is that for one thing he’s much more relaxed. He’s figured out what he can and can’t do, adjusted his preparation, and now it’s just more fluid. Everything is more comfortable.”
Zyontz continued, “It’s like playing. You gotta get reps to be good at it. Very rarely do you see someone step into something new and thrive right away, no matter what your fame is or your level of success doing other things.”
Brady and Burkhardt will be on the call Sunday afternoon at 4:25 ET for Bills-Eagles, a matchup between two teams with Super Bowl aspirations.
