Brady Quinn stepping in for Mark Sanchez shows value of preparation, NFL on Fox bench

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Brady Quinn's one-day turnaround

The most bizarre sports media story in a while is what happened with NFL on Fox analyst Mark Sanchez this weekend. Early Saturday morning, TMZ broke the news of Sanchez being hospitalized with stab wounds, and ESPN's Adam Schefter followed that up with a later-deleted tweet about a "robbery." The incident's now led to a level-5 felony charge against Sanchez for his role in allegedly confronting and attacking a 69-year-old truck driver, who says he stabbed Sanchez in self-defense. But while there will likely be lots to sort out there in the days to come, including what happens with Sanchez as a broadcaster and if Schefter faces any repercussions for once again getting news significantly wrong (unlikely, considering the treatment he gets at ESPN), an item of immediate interest is how Brady Quinn replaced Sanchez on a NFL on Fox game broadcast on less than a day's notice.

​As per Albert Breer at Sports Illustrated, Quinn was only asked to fill Sanchez's seat at 9:55 a.m. Eastern Saturday. That was just over 27 hours from the 1 p.m. ET kickoff of the Las Vegas Raiders-Indianapolis Colts game in question, and was five minutes before Quinn went on the air in his usual role on Fox's Big Noon Kickoff college football pregame show. But Quinn has a lot of experience on the NFL front as well; while his main Fox role is on CFB these days (including on BNK, where he's been a panelist since the show's 2019 start), he also co-hosts daily Fox Sports Radio show 2 Pros and a Cup of Joe. And he's worked at Fox as a CFB and NFL analyst since 2014, and he played seven seasons in the NFL. That's a pretty good background for an emergency analyst, especially considering the geographic and time restrictions also involved this time.

Some of the most interesting parts of Breer's note on this (part of his overall Monday Morning Quarterback column, which he took over at SI from Peter King following King's exit for a full-time NBC role in 2018) are about Quinn's timeline following that news. With a game broadcast, it's vital not just to get commentators there, but get them there with sufficient preparation to have insightful things to say about the teams. That often requires both film and interviews.

And while short turnarounds are challenging for play-by-play voices too, the split of the play-by-play/analysis roles means a good portion of the play-by-play announcer's on-air time is spent just calling the action of "what happened?" There's room for them to add insights as well, and good play-by-play voices often do that (with the aid of film and interview preparation), but it does seem easier for play-by-play announcers to call a number of games even in different sports on a short turnaround (as has often happened). Analysts are fully there to provide the "how" and "why," with more time on that front to fill, and doing that well requires an immense amount of preparation. That's why we don't often see short-notice analyst switches apart from situations where they're obviously needed, such as this one.

So, how did Quinn do that? Breer writes that Quinn figured his best chance to prepare for this was to head from Big Noon Kickoff's Ann Arbor, MI location to his Columbus, OH home as planned (a drive of just over three hours), using the Jeevz car service he has drive his Sprinter van on short trips (which allows him to watch film and make calls while in transit). He made some Zoom calls along the way, got to his home office at 7 p.m. ET, spent four more hours watching tape and talking to Colts' head coach Shane Steichen and assistants he knows from both sides.

Quinn then went to bed at 11 p.m., but got up at 3 a.m. for a feeding of his son Cade (his youngest of five kids with wife Alicia Sacramone Quinn, the former star gymnast). He then got a little more sleep before heading on the road to Indianapolis (another three-hour drive) at 6 a.m., arriving at 9 a.m. with plenty of time to get set up in the booth alongside play-by-play voice Chris Myers. That proved useful too, especially as that booth didn't have a sideline reporter this week, putting more on the in-booth voices. But the call (a 40-6 win for the Colts) seemed to go as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Here's what Quinn told Breer about the experience via text:

There are a few important takeaways from this situation. One is the massive value of a bench, and that's an area where Fox's NFL broadcasting tonnage comes in handy. Unlike NBC, Amazon, and ESPN (usually one NFL game a week each, two in some circumstances), Fox and CBS have a huge amount of games each Sunday, so they have a lot of broadcasting crews. If a situation like this had happened with a higher team calling a more widely-distributed game (this one only aired in the teams' markets, plus California and parts of Oregon and Idaho), Fox might have been able to move up an analyst from a lower team. With it happening on a lower team, they had to bring in someone not already on the weekly NFL on Fox roster, but that was for a less high-profile role than if this had happened on a top team or an only team.

The other area where Fox's bench mattered here was in being able to call on someone who'd been with the company for more than a decade, with at least some of that time in NFL analysis roles. And that has a lot to do with their studio show programming at FS1. While Quinn is most known for his Big Noon Kickoff work on Fox proper and his Fox Sports Radio work these days, he was part of the team of analysts hired for roles on various shows around FS1's 2013 launch. And Fox has been smart to keep a versatile piece like Quinn around and find ways to use him, including on CFB and NFL games at times, and in this unexpected role this week. (Also of note there, it helped that Fox could pair Quinn with a remarkable veteran like Myers, who's been at Fox since 1998 and has seen a whole lot of unexpected circumstances in his decades broadcasting across many networks.)

But the last takeaway here is more negative for Fox. Breer's note on Quinn here is interesting for showing some specifics of a NFL on Fox game analyst's preparation, including those calls with a head coach and assistants on both sides. Quinn's preparation was obviously truncated thanks to him getting this assignment with less than 24 hours, but he still got a lot in, and that helped him on this broadcast.

A typical Fox analyst in a typical week could do even more, including in-person prep meetings with coaches and attendance of practices. But that's not completely true for their lead and highest-paid NFL analyst Tom Brady, thanks to his other role as a part-owner of the Raiders and the league restrictions associated with that. Brady has been allowed to meet with coaches this year after not being able to do so in his rookie season, but is still banned from attending team practices.

The lifting of the meeting restriction at least allows Brady to come closer to the prep work of a typical analyst. As the Quinn situation shows, that can matter immensely (despite attempts from the likes of Schefter to claim it doesn't). But it comes with some deserved skepticism from teams that are competing against the team Brady part-owns (and is reportedly quite involved with, even sitting in their coaching booth with a headset on during a game last month).

And there remain plenty of questions about Brady as a game analyst, from how the practice restriction affects him to how much time he's putting in while juggling his other roles (including with the Raiders) to just what insights he has to offer on-air. This particular Quinn-Sanchez situation certainly isn't directly about Brady, but it does show some of what goes into preparing for and calling a NFL game. And it will be interesting to see if Brady is able to improve on that front this year now that the NFL's dropped the meeting restriction he previously faced.

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