PHOENIX — Greg Olsen has gotten used to the question by now.
“If I had a dollar for every Tom Brady question,” he said this week, “I would have his contract.”
In May, Fox announced that Brady would become the network’s lead game analyst alongside play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt once he retired — and would be paid a reported $375 million over 10 years to do so.
In the interim, Fox turned to Olsen, the Bears’ standout tight end from 2007-10 who had been paired with Burkhardt in 2021. Olsen knew right away that more people than ever would hear his voice this season, as Fox held the rights to the Super Bowl. He tries not to think about exactly how many people will tune in, though; the NFL found that, last year, 208 million people, or about two-thirds of the American population, watched the Super Bowl.
His one-year stint on Fox’s lead announcing team turned into two this week, when Brady said he wouldn’t start broadcasting until 2024. The network, though, should consider finding a way to keep Olsen in a prominent role even once Brady emerges with a year’s worth of Sunshine State tan. In just his second full NFL season, and at just age 37, Olsen has emerged as one of the game’s best analysts.
He’s football’s version of Conan O’Brien when Jay Leno came back for the “Tonight” show — skilled, but, because of circumstances, also the people’s choice. Social media seems to love him.
“As we all know,” he said wryly, “the Internet can change very quickly.”
Part of Olsen’s charm is how he’s dealt with being Brady’s seat-warmer. He’d love to call games with Burkhart for another decade, but knows that’s unlikely. He credits Fox for turning to him, even if it’s made for an awkward situation. He swears it’s not a distraction this week, even though Brady retired just last week.
“I’ve never shied away from it, I’ve never tried to hide in the corner,” Olsen said. “It is the reality of the situation. I’m a big boy. I know what I signed up for. My goal was to try to be good.”
Olsen wasn’t sure whether he would be — but he vowed to see it through. In 2017, he became the third active player to serve as Fox game analyst, calling one game. He did another in 2019. In 2020, he called XFL games with Burkhardt.
Last year, the two were Fox’s No. 2 crew. They were bumped up to top slot when Joe Buck and Troy Aikman went to “Monday Night Football.”
Olsen studies the way he did as a player — “The hardest thing about any of these games is really everything up until the ball is kicked off,” he said — but tries not to sound rote. He typically brings more information than CBS’ lead analyst, Tony Romo, and does so without the breathless schtick. He’s noticing small details now — Olsen will watch a game and notice the details of a Telestrator, or text a producer about how a broadcast crew edits replays so quickly.
Olsen never used to care about the announcers. With the Bears, the former first-round pick tried to block out the media as a rule.
“It’s not an easy market,” he said. “They were good to me at times, bad to me at times. They were probably better to me after I left, which I always found amusing. They would always write the nice things about me after I left town.”
That’s because he was the one that got away.
“That’s always how it works,” he said, smiling.
The Bears traded Olsen to the Panthers on the eve of training camp in 2011 when he was deemed incompatible with offensive coordinator Mike Martz’s system. He spent nine years with the Panthers, reaching three Pro Bowls. From 2011 until he retired following the 2020 season, Olsen trailed only Jimmy Graham, Rob Gronkowski and Travis Kelce in receiving yards by a tight end.
It was one of the worst trades in Bears history.
“I loved my time in Chicago,” he said. “I loved playing there. The crowd, the fans, it had kind of a college vibe in the sense that people lived, breathed, died for Chicago football. We had some good moments there; I was able to experience some really good times.
“But you learned at a young age, if you’re gonna get wrapped up in every headline and every news article and every reporter’s opinion of your third-down play and your blocking ….”
Now he’s the critic on the biggest stage in sports.
“You better be prepared for pretty much everything and be able to rattle it off and spit it out,” Olsen said. “For me, that’s the fun of it. That’s the challenge of why I was driven to calling games as opposed to some of the other stuff. It’s hard to do.”
The last time Olsen was part of a Super Bowl, seven years ago, he trudged off the field while the Broncos celebrated a 14-point win against his Panthers.
“It is nice to know I don’t have that,” he said. “But there’s a different type of pressure, a different type of responsibility.”
