Before Tom Brady won his fourth Super Bowl, Joe Montana was the undisputed GOAT of NFL quarterbacks. And much like Brady, one of Montana's first big jobs after football was broadcasting - until he famously gave up the career for good.
In a recent interview with CNBC's Alex Sherman, Montana opened up about why he left the broadcasting game so early when it could have been so lucrative. The bottom line for Montana was that he felt pressured too much to make judgements of players due to how much he understands about what goes into every decision. As a result, he felt "uncomfortable" making the kind of judgements about players that the networks wanted him to.
“Coming from the other side as a player, you see so many times, people are making judgments on a player, or on what happened on the field, and they have no idea,” Montana said. “It would be hard to judge our receivers, our quarterbacks, that played under Bill [Walsh] because our receivers had so many adjustments they could make on a hook; a hook doesn’t always have to be a hook. A hook went to a post, it went to an out, it went to a cross. It just depended on the defense. So, as someone sitting up in the box, you have no idea what all those are, who misread who, and all that.
“I just didn’t like making those kinds of judgments on players. I was uncomfortable.”
The real story?
NFL fans have long-criticized color commentators such as Jon Gruden or Tony Romo from completely sidestepping any statements that might be critical of a player. So there was a degree of empathy for Montana over simply leaving the career rather than doing something he didn't want to do.
But for the most part, fans dismissed Montana as leaving the commentary role because he simply wasn't that good at it.
"That's not true, he was really, really bad on air," one user remarked.
"He was also terrible at it," another wrote.
"He also was bad at it and got tons of criticism," write a third.
Montana said that things are different now in terms of what they expect from players-turned-broadcasters. He had high praise for Tom Brady, Troy Aikman and Tony Romo, but believes there's less pressure on them than there was on him.
“I think a couple of the guys do an extremely good job,” Montana said. “I haven’t seen much of Tom, but I know Troy and Tony Romo. I think when you look at how they analyze a game, it is a little bit different. They’ll even get into the ‘Well, I’m not sure…’
“When I was there, they just wanted you to be definitive, argumentative, and they didn’t care whether you were right or wrong, and I didn’t feel very good about that.”
The game has certainly changed a lot since Montana's days - inside and out.