Nate Burleson starts hosting the CBS morning show next week because it’s cool on the air. It emits great vibrations, soft and relaxed like anyone on television.
While this is true, off the air, Burleson was so stressed at one point during his tenure in the NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football” that he lost his hair.
Specifically, I could no longer grow facial hair.
He went to a dermatologist, who asked him if alopecia, a condition that prevents hair growth, appeared in his family. Burleson said no.
Burleson had a great deal of anxiety over GMFB wake-up calls at 4 a.m., while trying to be a good husband and father present. He tried to do it all: be great in the morning, not miss his kids ’practices or games or a date with his wife.
He landed him at the dermatologist. As he said, he could have been a psychologist.
“It was stressful,” Burleson said by phone Tuesday.
He’s now discovered it to such a high level that he’s joined “CBS Mornings” as he moves on to a new Times Square set. It’s one more step in what is becoming an amazing television career.
“I’m a dreamer,” Burleson said.
He’s becoming another Michael Strahan, though Burleson didn’t have the Super Bowl-winning and Super Bowl-winning Giant career in New York.
During Burleson’s solid, but not spectacular, 11 years in the NFL, he played the second violin of the stature of Randy Moss and Calvin Johnson. But there was something in him that resonated off the field.
“This guy is different,” said Mark Lepselter, a Burleson TV agent.
People who are not on TV also noticed it. In his stops as a player, Burleson reminds Detroit and Seattle that staff guys (Galen Duncan of the Lions and Maurice Kelly of the Seahawks) told Burleson he was going to get more and make more money after football.
High goals were set.
“I wanted to go from a former player, to an analyst covering Xs and Os to host, and then dancing with plug for entertainment, and finally the full evolution finally came to the news,” Burleson said.
When he started on the NFL network in 2014, Burleson only signed up on 60 or 70 dates, and then the daily fee was about $ 2,000, which is not bad, but not NFL money.
In 2016, Burleson lived in the home state of his wife, Arizona, making the easy move to Los Angeles to be in the NFL network. Life was good. Although he had big dreams, he was satisfied.
For GMFB, the job required a move to New York and wake-up calls at 4 p.m.
The New York vibe also scared him a little.
“When I went to visit, no one signaled me on the street, the cars were moving too fast,” said Burleson, who grew up in Calgary, where his father was a CFL receiver and then Seattle. . “I said, ‘I’m a west coast man and I don’t think I can survive out there.’
He thought about it a lot, talked it over and over again with his wife, Atoya, and his mother, Valerie, who decided the answer was no. That was all.
“It was the toughest decision,” Burleson said.
Just when the decision seemed unappealable, he looked in the mirror of one of the bathrooms in his house. He always preaches to his children that you need to be “comfortable being uncomfortable.” It could not be contradicted.
He came out of the bathroom and told Atoya he wanted to take the job. She was “visibly upset.” But he quickly supported it.
“There was a leap of faith to be able to move his wife and him from the west to live in northern New Jersey to work in New York five days a week,” Lepselter said.
Lepselter considered it a perfect fit, due to Burleson’s “attractive personality and keen spirit. And he’s a performer.”
Still, he had to face the fear of not sleeping. He investigated with other hosts in the morning, who said that after three to six months, Burleson would get used to the 4 a.m. alarm clock. He said it cost him three years. He lost facial hair in the process.
But it’s great on TV. From “Good Morning Football,” he landed on “The NFL Today” as an analyst. He worked for “Extra.” He will continue to participate in the previous CBS game and is expected to one day replace one of his mentors, James Brown, as host of the show. He will do one-off tasks on the NFL network.
Burleson is now a seven-figure TV star. If CBS is to be successful with the slightly renamed “CBS Morning,” it will probably have to do a lot with a solid 11-year NFL veteran who never played in New York, never won a Super Bowl and is not a Hall of Famer. . And who lost his hair when he started doing mornings.
CBS believes it has a cross star and the network may be right.