January 31, 2025

This has been a year full of firsts. For the first time since 2000, I am a rookie again. I am the new guy in the booth for FOX. My job is to call America’s Game of the Week next to my broadcast partner Kevin Burkhardt, and break down the game I love for twenty million people every Sunday.

I remember thinking before stepping into the booth to call my first regular season game, how much has changed in the world, and in the world of football, since I stepped onto the field to play in my first regular season game. There was no Facebook or Instagram, no iPhones or TikTok. No Tesla or YouTube. In 2000, the Raiders were still in Oakland, there were no teams in Los Angeles, and you could still hit the quarterback (more on that linked below!). Today, LA has two teams. We play games in Europe, we have tablets on the sidelines, and somewhere along the line half the referees got jacked.

What an amazing game! And I have found that my part in broadcasting it—explaining it to the country in real time—is maybe the most invigorating challenge I have ever experienced in my professional life.

First and foremost, there is so much more to learn than I realized. Last week, Drew Brees was a guest on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and he was asked by Stephen about the complexity of offensive play calls. Drew explained that each piece of a play call signals to a specific position group what they’re supposed to do on a given play.

The look on Colbert’s face was priceless. His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped, like Drew had just translated the Dead Sea Scrolls right in front of him. And hey, I get it! I felt the same way reviewing tape in preparation for the NFC Championship game this past weekend between two of the league’s top rushing attacks. (The Eagles run the ball nearly two-thirds of the time. In the first two playoff rounds, the Commanders ran the ball 75 times.). Over my years with the Patriots, especially, I was responsible for knowing the ins and outs of one of the league’s more complex passing systems. I also became an expert in defensive pass coverages. It was a lot of work that left very little time to learn much more about the running game than which way to turn on a handoff and which fronts to audible out of into a pass.

But it wasn’t until I got in the booth for that first game between the Cowboys and the Browns that I realized how much I still didn’t know and how much more information there is to ingest as a broadcaster. There are 22 guys on the field, each with an assignment on every play, some playing through injuries we know about, others we don’t. There are 31 other guys on each team who may or may not see snaps. There are calls coming in from both sidelines. There are coaches screaming at side judges. There’s the game clock and the play clock to keep an eye on. There’s weather conditions. There’s the intangible stuff like momentum and body language to be aware of. There are commercial breaks and tosses to and from the studio. And then there’s the most basic task of listening to what Kevin is saying and responding to his questions or adding to his play-by-play.

Like a chef who questions their ability when they’re in the weeds during a busy service, when things really get going during a broadcast and you have information flying at you from a dozen directions, for brief moments it can make you wonder: Do I actually understand this game? Do I even know English?

If an NFL playbook is a Mount Everest of information, a single NFL broadcast is the entire Himalayan mountain chain—there isn’t enough time, energy or oxygen to cover it all. And that, for me, has been the other, exciting part of the challenge: figuring out how to clearly communicate as much valuable information as possible in the short window between snaps.

This, really, was my first big test in that first Cowboys-Browns game: could I say what I needed to say? All in all, I think I did okay for a rookie. (I survived, which is the important thing.) Media critics and online commentators, however, thought I sounded nervous, or timid. In the first half, in particular, I didn’t string too many full sentences together, they said. It was like I had a hitch in my verbal giddyup. Which I guess is true, because all of the information that was assaulting my senses every forty seconds had the effect of separating my mind from my mouth. It was too much, too quickly, too soon, to process into clear, effortless, fluid language. The god’s honest truth is that, like with anything complicated, the key to comfort and competence is just more reps.

On the football field, I’ve had enough reps that I can take in that mountain of information, make a quick decision and then my mind and body will do hundreds of little things all at once to produce an action. In broadcasting, you don’t get to do hundreds of things at once. You can only say one thing at a time, and you do it hundreds of times over.

Think about it like the difference between driving a car and talking about driving a car. You’ve probably spent thousands of hours behind the wheel in your life driving yourself to work or your kids to and from school. Many times, you probably relied on muscle memory more than conscious effort to get you from point A to point B. Now, imagine riding in the backseat while someone else is driving, and your job is to describe everything you’re seeing in real time to a blindfolded person sitting next to you so that when you arrive at your destination they’ll be able to understand where they are and how they got there.

Without a lot of experience and practice, you’ll be hurtling down the road trying desperately to get your mouth to catch up with what your eyes see and what your brain wants to communicate. And what it will sound like is a string of unrelated nouns, some adjectives, and maybe a few verbs if you’re lucky. Trees! Rain! Cars! More cars! Traffic. Turning right. Red truck. Sun is bright.

That’s how I’ve tried to describe getting into broadcasting to people who ask me how it’s going. And not unlike narrating to the blindfolded, with more reps in the booth, I understand that the trick is in figuring out what to say first, then second, then third (and then when to stop talking) in each moment, so that the game I’m describing feels like a richer version of the game you are watching on TV at home.

That’s what makes this new gig such an exciting challenge–it’s a whole new skillset that requires a different part of my brain. Not just to execute, either; also to evaluate whether or not I’m doing a good job. When it’s all said and done, that may end up being the hardest part of this new role. As a player, I had the scoreboard, and stats (completion percentage, yards per attempt, TDs vs INTs) and trophies. I had objective, quantifiable ways to measure success. As a broadcaster, I’ve got none of that. It’s all squishy and subjective. One person can love my voice, another person can hate it. One person can appreciate my analysis, another person can be confused by it. I can only imagine what fans of AFC East teams think! I treasure the supportive texts from my mom and dad, and from my kids, but that doesn’t tell me if I succeeded in conveying the importance of a busted coverage on third down that led to a go-ahead score late in the fourth quarter, or if my analysis is leaving viewers more or less informed. Nothing will give me those answers, and I have to learn to be good with that.

One thing that helped me get to that place was a piece of advice I got from a mentor of mine, who told me about half-way through the season that if I felt confident and I had fun during a broadcast, I probably did a pretty good job. Well, I’ve been having fun from the jump, and my confidence was at an all-time high this past week for the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia, so I am fired up and ready to kill it for Super Bowl LIX down in New Orleans come February 9th.

My Favorite Thing (From Conference Championship Week 🏆)

When a game turns into a blowout - even a game with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line - we need to help keep things interesting. To help, the director will task the camera guys with scanning the sidelines and the crowd looking for fun moments or interesting people that we can talk about. When they find someone good, a producer might give us a heads-up through our earpiece about who or what they are about to cut to. Usually. Not this time.

Waiting for Philly to kickoff after officially putting the game out of reach, there on my monitor was Nick Foles. Mr. Philly Special. One of only two quarterbacks to beat me in the Super Bowl and make me understand exactly how Jerry felt every time Newman got one over on him. For some reason, people think I hate Nick (and Eli). Like he took something that belonged to me. I understand: playoff football is a zero-sum game. One team wins, one team loses. But it’s possible to be genuinely happy for someone–especially Nick, who’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, on or off the field–while also being furious every time you think about the time you lost to them. Not only is it possible, it’s necessary. We need more good guys. We need more heroes. On that very, very cold day in Minneapolis, back in 2018, he was both.

Camera Roll

Linked

​Unrivaled | What's the Future for the Newest 3x3 League​

One of the many characteristics I share with my dad is a love for forwarding email links 😂. I’ll include one or two articles from the past week if I’ve read something I found interesting.

From my involvement with the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, I’ve been following Unrivaled closely. This article does a good job of painting the path forward for the league: it’s about sustainability and, to a certain degree, patience. “We put ourselves in a great position to be successful right away, “ Alex Brazell, the league president, said in the article, “but it’s a marathon.”

The Aces have a few players involved and just from a travel and energy perspective I can already tell it’s going to be a significant (and sustainable) improvement over having to head to Europe for months at a time in order to make enough money to buy a new car. I don’t need to lecture anyone about the popularity of the W right now, but I think between the star power and quick pacing that younger generations flock to, Unrivaled has staying power too.

Calendar

Monday - Hoops and Volleyball practice w/ the kids

Tuesday - Fly to NOLA, Media Day

Wednesday - Photoshoot, Production Dinner

Thursday - Rehearsal/Walk Through

Friday - Fanatics Lunch

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With Appreciation,