What football fans see on TV is just a snapshot of each play. Just ask Tom Brady.
In the return of Brady’s Verizon Access Mailbag, the seven-time Super Bowl winner was asked what fans miss while watching a game on television and how they can better grasp football strategy and flow. Even as a broadcaster, Brady admitted that watching a game live on television only gives fans a small picture of what’s happening on each play.
“That’s such a great question,” Brady said. “I actually don’t think TV does the game justice in terms of all the complexity of the game. I even know from broadcasting that there’s only so much I can explain in a short period of time and the camera follows the ball an awful lot. So, you see so much on-ball movement, but the reason why the game works is all the off-ball movement. We just don’t get a chance to describe it that much.”
So, in order to learn more about the game, Brady thinks the answer to understanding football better is to watch games beyond the live broadcast.
“I would say try to watch some All-22 film with breakdowns of people you really like or can listen to,” Brady said. “A lot of people do these kinds of breakdowns just to understand the nuances of each individual play.”
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While they aren’t necessarily film breakdowns, FOX Sports lead college football analyst Joel Klatt launched his “Understanding Football” series earlier this year. In it, Klatt explains certain play concepts and formations to help fans know what certain terms mean.
And as Brady knows, there’s a lot of complexity to football playcalls and terminology that lead to a lot of nuance on each play. That led Brady to compare the game to a different form of entertainment.
“There’s so much to every play — both plays that are made and not made,” Brady said. “You can always look at it as a good offensive play or a bad defensive play and vice versa. But the nuances of the game are so intricate. There’s so many things happening at once.
“It’s almost like an opera. There’s so much choreography going into everyone and there’s so many different people involved. When it’s done right, it looks pretty easy. But as we know in the NFL, it’s really hard to do it right consistently over time.”
As Brady laid out the complexities of the game and how to best understand them, he’s now challenging fans to go out there and put in the work to understand the game better.
“Another subscription. Go get it done,” Brady said. “No excuses.”
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