The NFL is easing some of its restrictions on Tom Brady as he prepares for his second season as Fox Sports’ top analyst.
The league will allow Brady to participate in production meetings with teams, as long as they are conducted virtually or via Zoom. He still isn’t allowed to watch practices or set foot in a team’s training complex.
The Brady rules were put in place due to the seven-time Super Bowl winning quarterback having a 5% stake as a limited owner in the Las Vegas Raiders.
Brady was allowed to attend production meetings with Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles players and coaches before Super Bowl 59. He wasn’t able to view practices.
“The ability to join and be able to talk to a coach, coordinators or players and help him prepare for his job was one that felt like a natural step forward,” Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Many of the network broadcast crews have done their production meetings with teams virtually, even though some still prefer getting into a city on Friday to watch the home team and then talk to the visiting team at their hotel the next day.
Before the Super Bowl, Brady said that not being allowed in production meetings did not affect his research when preparing for games, even though there were other benefits he acknowledged he missed.
“I think the best part (of production meetings) is there are just genuine relationships that get built up over time, and it’s a shared experience with people on your own crew sitting on calls and talking,” he said.
“From a research standpoint, I listen to press conferences all week. To me, there’s no difference in a media member asking a question on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday press conference that would be any different from any of the questions I would ask or the crew would ask.”
Fox’s top crew of Brady, Kevin Burkhardt, Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi will call the NFC East matchup between the New York Giants and Washington Commanders on Sept. 7 before the Eagles face the Chiefs in a Super Bowl rematch the following week.
Fox Sports president of production and operations/executive producer Brad Zager said in an interview with the AP earlier this year that any inferences about a potential conflict of interest between Brady calling games and being part of the Raiders’ decision-making process are unfounded.
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