- Tom Brady says he's really going to stay retired from the NFL this time.
- Brady's next chapter is already taking shape, with a deal to join Fox as a broadcaster in 2024.
PHOENIX — Tom Brady's second retirement looks like it's going to stick.
A bit of paperwork Brady filed on Friday, according to ESPN, indicated that he's really not coming back this time. After last season's brief 40-day retirement experiment from Brady, it was certainly worth double-checking.
Brady is looking toward his next chapter and appears to have a plan in place.
While he is hanging up his cleats, Brady won't be leaving football entirely, as he has already signed a mega-deal with Fox to become a broadcaster in the future. The deal was worked out during Brady's brief retirement last year and is worth a reported $375 million over 10 years according to Andrew Marchand at the New York Post.
It's not hard to see why Brady said yes to the gig — that payday is worth more than Brady made in the entirety of his 23 NFL seasons, and he retired as the highest-earning player in league history. But Brady isn't jumping in right away, instead planning to take the rest of this year to decompress and study up before heading to the booth in 2024.
During Super Bowl week, Insider asked several star commentators if they had any advice for Brady as he heads to the booth. Across the board, they all believed that he could quickly become just as much a legend as a broadcaster as he was a player.
"Enjoy it," NBC play-by-play man Mike Tirico told Insider as his advice to Brady on the red carpet ahead of NFL Honors on Thursday. "It is work, but Tom's not afraid of putting in the hard work. I think he'll do great."
"I have a feeling Tom Brady will handle it just fine," agreed Andrew Whitworth, who made the jump from playing to speaking at the desk for Amazon's "Thursday Night Football" broadcasts last year. "He's got all the means and everything you could ever want in your career. He's done it all. I'm sure he'll handle it just fine."
For Whitworth, the same force that drove him to be great on the field has driven him in his broadcasting career, and he thinks the same will be true for Brady.
"Everything's a learning process," Whitworth said. "If you're kind of wired to be really good at what you do, you're wired to want to be successful, then I think you're always chasing and evaluating yourself. When I was a player, probably at times too much, I was always my harshest critic. I'm that way off the field now as well."
"It's just about being yourself. That's the thing people love the most, is to see you be you," he continued.
Kurt Warner, another quarterbacking great that built a second act as a broadcaster, also had high hopes for Brady but suggested that he get to work fast.
"Find the next thing quickly," Warner told Insider would be his advice for Brady. "That's what you come to realize when you get to that point of retirement. You're never going to get over the thrill of playing, the challenge that it is to play against the best in the world. The feeling that it is for three hours on Sunday. You never get over that, so you gotta find something else very quickly."
"We need to figure out if we can do something else well," Warner said. "You know, when I retired, and I'm sure Tom's going through that too: 'Can I do anything else well?'"
"Especially when you've done it as well as he did for so long, but I think he'll embrace the challenge and he's going to be great," he continued.
While Brady isn't immediately jumping into the booth, if he gets to work studying in 2023, he could hit the ground running as a broadcaster in 2024.
Clearly, those that made the jump before him believe in his ability.