![]() ![]() However he arrived at the job, Olsen has thrown himself into the work ever since. The network immediately paired him with Burkhardt, who had covered some of Olsen’s high school football games as a local reporter in New Jersey. Olsen called it quits following the 2020 NFL season, using the retirement announcement to also reveal his plans to join Fox. “It was never really like one day I said, ‘Hey, I want to get into TV.’ Over time, things came my way, and over that same amount of time, each opportunity became slightly bigger and bigger.” “It never really was on my radar in any official manner,” he said. That may sound like someone who had long been plotting a career in television, but Olsen downplayed his broadcasting ambitions. He also dabbled in commentary on local sports shows in Charlotte, where he still lives with his wife, Kara, and their three children. ![]() Two years later, while still playing for the Panthers, Olsen spent his bye week in the booth as a guest analyst for Fox, returning for an encore in 2019. He did his first audition for Fox in 2015, when he was out in Los Angeles visiting a friend. Like Brady, Olsen had his career in broadcasting set in motion before his playing days ended. “I’m not gonna sit here and lie to you and give you some cliché answer about I never think about it,” Olsen said of the situation with Brady. Olsen said his approach to this season will be “no different than it was last year,” but that hardly means he’s tuned out all the noise. “Greg will be on the number two team next year when Tom joins Fox,” Olsen’s agent, Peter Raskin, told me in an email. Contrary to some suggestions that he could jump to another network next season, Olsen apparently isn’t going anywhere. Olsen reportedly makes $10 million a year as Fox’s lead commentator, a figure that will drop to $3 million when he is bumped to the number two role by Brady. Tony Romo ushered in the era in 2017, when CBS handed him a 10-year, $180 million deal to serve as its top NFL color analyst. Amazon is reportedly paying Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit around $10 million a year to anchor its broadcasts of Thursday Night Football. ESPN pried Aikman and his play-by-play partner, Joe Buck, away from Fox last year with deals that reportedly pay them both well over $10 million annually. Olsen is also operating at a time when it has never been better––or more lucrative– to work as an NFL broadcaster, what The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis has dubbed the “announcer empowerment era.” It isn’t just Brady who has capitalized. ![]() In May, Olsen won outstanding sports personality/emerging on-air talent at the annual Sports Emmy Awards. His career now has real momentum, coming off a season and Super Bowl in which his commentary was lauded by both fans and critics. It is a watershed moment for Olsen, and for sports broadcasting. I’m gonna make it as difficult as possible to say, ‘'I can’t believe we have to replace this guy,’” Olsen told me. ![]() (This Sunday, he’ll be in Chicago for the Bears–Green Bay Packers matchup.) In February, Olsen landed the ultimate assignment, calling Super Bowl LVII alongside Fox’s top play-by-play announcer, Kevin Burkhardt. The title ensures that Olsen is assigned to the network’s marquee game each week, often the one that occupies the late-Sunday-afternoon time slot. Olsen is entering his second year as the lead analyst on Fox’s NFL broadcasts, a role most recently occupied by Troy Aikman and once held by the late John Madden. But in his second career as a broadcaster, Olsen suddenly finds himself like Joe Montana peering over his shoulder at a newly acquired Steve Young. He was a first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears, and later became one of Cam Newton’s favorite targets for the Carolina Panthers, where he established himself as one of the best in the league at his position. In Greg Olsen’s 14-season career as a tight end, his job security was seldom in doubt. It’s a timeless tale of the NFL preseason, the incumbent starter thrust into a competition for snaps against his impending replacement. ![]()
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