People who work in the network C-suite are more used to having lunch at The Palm than to looking over their shoulders as they enter a hotel. But when Fox was trying to sign Tom Brady, the hotel meeting turned out to be a big moment. “It was a meeting that I think changed my life forever,” Brady told me last week.
On March 6, 2022, Eric Shanks and Brad Zager, two Fox executives, sat in a room at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. They were trying to meet Brady in the most inconspicuous way possible. The meeting had been scheduled for 8 a.m. on a Sunday. Shanks and Zager were the only two executives at Fox who knew about it. Later, one Fox employee called the operation the network’s version of the Manhattan Project.
Shanks and Zager were trying to convince Brady, who’d retired from football, to take a job he’d never shown interest in. They wanted to make Brady Fox’s no. 1 NFL analyst and have him call the next Super Bowl.
Zager, who is 46, produced Los Angeles Dodgers games before becoming Fox Sports’ head of production. As he and Shanks waited for Brady, Zager found himself thinking about … Edward Snowden. Years before, Zager had seen HBO’s John Oliver go to a hotel room to interview the whistleblower-in-exile. As he waited to see whether his subject would arrive, Oliver asked, “Why would he, when you think about it?” Zager had the same thought about Brady.
A few minutes later, Brady entered the room with Steve Dubin, his agent Don Yee’s business partner. “It all went down right there,” said Brady. The meeting lasted nearly three hours. To kick it off, Shanks and Zager directed Brady to an iPad to show him a recruiting video.
The Great Announcer Swap of 2022 seemed to call for a little cloak-and-dagger. NFL booths that rarely change went full NBA. Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, and Al Michaels—who’d spent a combined 65 years at their previous networks—got new jobs. And they were paid richly for it. Executives began to submit to the idea that Tony Romo’s $17.5-million-per-year contract wasn’t an anomaly. Agents saw it as the new number to match, or as an opening bid.
Fox’s signing of Brady was the most surprising move of 2022, not least to people at Fox who weren’t in on the negotiations. Before Brady calls his first game on Sunday, it’s a story worth telling. It involves three other Fox announcers: Greg Olsen, Kevin Burkhardt, and Joe Davis. It shows something about the way Fox acquires talent, which is close to the way baseball teams build up their systems over a period of years.
One way to understand the Great Announcer Swap is as a series of crazy deals that led to even crazier ones. Aikman became more valuable as soon as Romo signed his 2020 mega-contract. So Aikman negotiated an opt-out clause that made him a free agent two years later. Meanwhile, Fox had sold its 2022 season of Thursday Night Football games to Amazon. Amazon tried to hire Aikman. Then ESPN offered Aikman a contract that was even bigger than Romo’s.
It was only because [Brady] was retired that we threw that Hail Mary.Brad Zager
Fox’s sports division prides itself on the fact that its employees, on the air and off, rarely leave the network. In February 2022, Aikman’s departure for ESPN seemed like the end of a long, increasingly strained marriage. (Aikman would later say that Fox never made him a counteroffer.) Weeks later, Fox employees were stunned when the network allowed Buck to leave with a year left on his contract so that he could join Aikman. “I thought Joe would do the World Series and the Super Bowl there forever, just like everybody did,” said Davis.
Now, Fox executives were tasked with filling vacancies that Zager has compared to spots on the Supreme Court. They had to choose a play-by-play announcer and analyst to call their NFL game of the week. They also needed a play-by-play announcer to replace Buck on the World Series.
On February 1, 2022, a transaction took place that seemed to have little to do with TV. Brady retired from football after 22 seasons. Well, he sort of retired. After spending 40 days contemplating his future, Brady went back to Tampa Bay to play one more season.
Those 40 days were a blip in Brady’s career. But they offered an opening for Fox to make its pitch. “It was only because he was retired that we threw that Hail Mary,” said Zager.
As a player, Brady showed little interest in the TV business during production meetings, the usual sign an athlete wants to be an announcer. “The last thing on your mind is who’s broadcasting the game,” said Brady. Moreover, he had reached a level of fame that seemed to make announcing unnecessary—at least in a full-contact, game-a-week sense.
But Shanks, Fox Sports’ CEO, likes to talk about taking big swings. Fox executives thought they should ask. They were haunted by the idea that, in a few months, someone would tell them, “Tom was interested. Why didn’t you reach out?”
Three days after learning Aikman was leaving, Zager sent a blind text message to Yee. Zager wrote that he and Shanks would like to “discuss a few possibilities,” never mentioning Brady or the job. A few days later, a meeting with Brady was set up at the Hotel Bel-Air. Fox began to work on the pitch.
Most announcers don’t get their jobs through wild public auctions. Building a network roster is a long-range project. Executives look at a group of announcers with different talents, different experience, and the same haircut and try to make the right bets.
Fox has a three-tiered approach to hiring announcers. First, the network likes to look for young announcers whom most of the world will meet on national TV. This philosophy dates back to 1994, when David Hill, the first president of Fox Sports, hired a 25-year-old Buck to call NFL games on the same network as Pat Summerall and John Madden. Years later, Fox hired former University of Colorado quarterback Joel Klatt to call games when he was hosting a sports radio show in Denver; Klatt is now the network’s lead analyst for college football.
Young announcers are cheaper than veterans, which helps balance the ledger as the price for the Aikman and Romo tier rises. Moreover, if network bosses pick the right draft-and-develop prospects, those announcers might one day replace the veterans, as Buck did with Summerall.
Nobody thought Buck would ever leave Fox. But, as it turned out, the network had hired his replacements before he even left. In 2013, Kevin Burkhardt came to Fox when he was the field reporter for New York Mets games on SNY. Burkhardt’s NFL play-by-play experience consisted mostly of calling Dallas Cowboys games—not for the local radio broadcast, but for a national Cowboys radio network few people know exists. Fox put Burkhardt in an NFL booth. By 2022, he was the no. 2 play-by-play announcer behind Buck and the host of the Major League Baseball studio show during the postseason.
In 2014, Davis’s agent sent the network a DVD full of clips. Davis, who was 26, was calling college games for outlying ESPN networks. He was two years removed from being the play-by-play voice of the Double-A Montgomery Biscuits. In those years, Davis told me, he was consumed with getting every detail right so that he could justify his place in the business. “I might have been nailing the basics, but it was a pretty rigid call,” he said.
Fox made a projection and hired Davis to call college football and basketball. By 2022, Davis was the no. 2 voice on baseball behind Buck and calling Dodgers games in Los Angeles.
On March 12, 2022, six days after meeting Brady at the Bel-Air, Zager flew to Las Vegas, where Burkhardt and Davis were covering the Pac-12 basketball tournament. Over a Champagne lunch, Zager told Burkhardt he was going to replace Buck on the NFL “A” team and call the Super Bowl. Then Zager sat with Davis in an empty lounge off a hotel lobby and offered him the chance to be the voice of baseball. “It looked like a scene from The Bachelor or The Bachelorette,” said Davis. “I started crying right on the spot.”
If the relative unknown is one type of announcer Fox tries to hire, the second can be described in terms known to baseball scouts. This is the announcer Fox sees more value in than other networks.
In 1994, Fox picked James Brown, a CBS play-by-play announcer who was low on his network’s roster, to be the host of Fox NFL Sunday. (Brown, who now has the same role at CBS, has been hosting an NFL pregame show for 30 consecutive years.) In recent years, Fox raided ESPN and gave bigger jobs to Jason Benetti (now calling college football for Fox) and Adam Amin (now calling NFL games and baseball).
Olsen, who became Fox’s no. 1 analyst for the two years between Aikman’s departure and Brady’s arrival, had been another undervalued prospect. Starting in 2017, when he was still playing tight end in the NFL, Fox used Olsen in its NFL and XFL booths and on its Super Bowl pregame show. After Olsen retired, he joined Burkhardt in the network’s no. 2 NFL booth.
Fox executives were afraid another network would swoop in to offer Olsen a bigger job. But ESPN, which had whiffed with Jason Witten, didn’t hire Olsen for its pre-Joe-and-Troy Monday Night booth. Amazon didn’t hire him for Thursday Night.
After Olsen gave up the big chair to Brady, he has been seen as a hard-luck announcing case. But, in a lot of ways, the 2022 negotiations were built around Olsen. Fox executives thought he was good enough to call a Super Bowl. His presence gave the network confidence to throw the Brady Hail Mary. According to Zager, Brady and Olsen were the only candidates considered for the job. “The Tom deal gets done or it’s Greg,” he said.
Brady is an example of the third type of announcer Fox likes to hire. These are megastars that require big swings, a category of announcers Zager calls “no graphic needed.” They’re instantly recognizable even to someone who barely follows sports.
Hiring big names seems obvious—who wouldn’t want to do that? But if you watch football on Sundays, you notice Fox collects more rings and gold jackets than other networks. Its pregame show includes Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Jimmy Johnson, Michael Strahan, and Rob Gronkowski. Its postseason baseball desk includes Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and David Ortiz. For soccer, Fox got Carli Lloyd. (A few examples of the network’s star hunting, like Reggie Bush and Frank Thomas, didn’t pan out.)
There are a couple of theories behind chasing the biggest stars. Their glow allows the network to develop young announcers like Burkhardt and Davis. Fox thinks it can get more out of stars: see A-Rod’s work in the studio with Burkhardt versus his days as an ESPN game analyst. Fox has another theory: that if you put together a locker room full of stars, someone like Brady is more likely to join it.
Before its meeting with Brady, Fox wanted to make sure it drove this point home. Zager went to Bill Richards, the coordinating producer of Fox NFL Sunday, and told him the network was preparing a pitch to Brady. Zager asked for a producer and editor who were skillful and discreet.
Ross Tiernan (the producer) and Joe Nargi (the editor) were enlisted in the project. They began putting together a three-and-a-half-minute recruiting video, as if Brady were a high school prospect who was being offered the biggest NIL deal in history.
The video’s title was DO NOT OPEN.v8. The title discouraged snoopers; the version number indicated the changes dictated by executives as they tried to get the pitch just right. (To keep even more people from being involved, Fox went out of house to find a voice-over artist to handle the narration.)
My job is no more important than the person doing graphics in the truck.Tom Brady
At the hotel, Brady watched a video that tried to sell him on the job in several different ways. There was a reminder that Fox’s sports division was created in 1994 to show pro football, and that the network was dedicated to football like Brady was. “Everyone at Fox, including myself, just absolutely loves football,” Brady told me, repeating the sentiment almost verbatim.
The video showed footage of Brady’s friends who worked for Fox. Gronk. Erin Andrews. Strahan, who cofounded Religion of Sports with Brady. And Charles Woodson, who was a freshman with Brady at the University of Michigan nearly 30 years ago.
Though Fox shows mostly NFC games, the video reminded Brady that he and the network had a connection. “We were there for your first,” a narrator said as footage played of Brady’s 2002 Super Bowl win, which was called by Summerall and Madden.
“And your most epic,” the narrator continued, as the video showed Brady coming back from 25 points down to beat the Falcons in 2017.
Last week, quoting the video, Brady told me, “I remember when John Madden said, ‘What Tom Brady just did gives me goosebumps.’”
Fox wanted to give Brady goosebumps. The video also showed Gus Johnson’s call of Michigan’s 2021 win over Ohio State, the first time Brady’s Wolverines had beaten their rivals in a decade.
Later, the narrator imagined Brady announcing Super Bowls for Fox in 2023 and 2025: “Starting this season, the eyes of the world will be upon you. … To build a new legacy, become the face of a network dedicated to giving you every resource possible to succeed with it.”
The video closed with a familiar Brady sound bite: “You know what ring is my favorite one? My favorite ring is the next one.”
“Welcome to the next one, Tom,” said the narrator.
After that, the conversation in the hotel began in general terms. “It was our first meeting,” said Brady. “We were just getting to know each other.” Then it got more specific, with Brady asking about what an announcer’s work week was like. Shanks and Zager emphasized that, for half the year, announcing was a full-time job that meant working on Thanksgiving and during the Christmas holidays. Brady would have to decide he wanted to dedicate that much of his time.
“You’re not in that meeting hoping that he looks at you and is like, ‘I’m in,’” said Zager. But Shanks and Zager thought Brady seemed intrigued. As they left the room, they glanced at each other as if to ask, Could this actually happen?
On Saturday, March 12, Zager flew to Las Vegas to see Burkhardt and Davis. On Sunday, Brady announced that he was unretiring. That seemed to end the idea of Brady being an announcer. He wouldn’t be calling the next Super Bowl, anyway.
Fox executives still thought Brady was genuinely interested in the job. So on Monday, March 14, Zager called Yee. He told him Fox would be willing to hold the no. 1 analyst job for Brady and mentioned that such jobs became open only rarely. A few days later, Yee said they should keep talking. It was then that Shanks and Zager began to think that Brady might really call games for them. “We just wanted to make sure that we were all in,” said Brady.
The two sides spent nearly two months figuring out what the deal would look like. During this stage of the negotiations, there was still only a tiny group of people at Fox who knew the network was pursuing Brady, including Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corporation executive chair and CEO. Brady told me he talked about the news only with his agents.
After the public negotiations that ended with Aikman going to ESPN, the Fox omertà seemed odd. Fox wasn’t saying anything. People outside the network’s circle of trust wondered whether Fox was reeling or, in the face of rising salaries, trying to go cheap.
There were strange rumors. At one point, a news article connected one NFL announcer with the Fox job. A Fox executive called the announcer’s agent and explained, politely, that the announcer wasn’t in the mix. The agent said he hadn’t thought so, but that he had been hearing the same rumor.
Brady’s contract turned out to be richer—$37.5 million per year, the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand reported—and more wide-ranging than any announcing deal. Besides calling games, Brady would be a network ambassador, working on what Murdoch called “client and promotional initiatives.”
Brady has spent this summer getting in shape for Week 1. On the Fox lot, he has practiced using his new job’s tools of the trade: the Telestrator he will draw on, the earpiece his producer Richie Zyontz will speak into. Brady went to NFL stadiums with Burkhardt and the crew and called two full preseason games and half of another, along with a UFL game.
Like many ex-players that go into TV, Brady has found that his traveling crew—from producer to camera operator—is a lot like a team. “Do your job” is a mantra in TV, just like it was for Bill Belichick. “My job is no more important than the person doing graphics in the truck,” Brady told me.
Brady has gone to the beach with his Fox teammates. Zyontz and director Rich Russo have paid visits to Brady’s house. This summer, Brady and the entire crew had lunch on the Fox lot. Because of Brady’s fame, some Fox bonding activities have been covered by TMZ.
Brady has mused about how announcers don’t have a scoreboard like quarterbacks do. “There’s plenty of things I’m going to screw up,” he told me. “It’s live television. But I think that I’m going out there to do my best … to work as hard as we can to get it perfect, knowing that it will never be perfect.”
Last week, the NFL announced that, because Brady is trying to become a minority owner of the Raiders, the league will prohibit him from attending weekly production meetings with other teams’ players and coaches. Brady and Fox won’t comment. Burkhardt and the Fox crew, of course, can still attend the meetings. And there’s a wealth of NFL information and film available to any fan, least of all a seven-time Super Bowl champ. It’s hard to believe Brady won’t have enough information to call a game.
Fox had wanted Murdoch to announce the Brady deal on the Fox Corporation’s May 10 earnings call. On May 9, Shanks and Zager barricaded themselves inside Shanks’s office on Pico Boulevard to work through the night.
Around 5:30 a.m. the next morning, they had an agreement that both sides were comfortable announcing. There was nowhere convenient for Shanks and Zager to celebrate that early in the morning. So they hung around, watching the news of the signing pop up on the TVs in Shanks’s office. “I remember listening to Lachlan on the call,” said Zager, “and then having that moment of like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe everybody knows about this.’”
