As the third quarter of the Cowboys’ dismissal of the Browns got under way on Sunday afternoon, Fox play-by-play anchor Kevin Burkhardt turned to his new on-air partner Tom Brady for guidance on what Cleveland needed to do to spark their limp offense into life. “How do they move the ball and get something going here?” Burkhardt asked, an issue on which the man widely considered the greatest quarterback of all time would, one assumes, have an original thought or two to offer the viewers at home. With a confident nod, Brady replied: “In order to move forward they need to stop from going backward.” Burkhardt laughed, but from the expression in his eyes you could tell he was crying inside. Is this what $375m buys you these days?
Brady’s TV debut was perhaps the most hotly anticipated sports broadcasting event of the year, a story the media has covered with breathless intensity in the run-up to the NFL’s kickoff weekend. The former New England Patriots legend signed a $375m deal with Fox in 2022 to become their lead Sunday football analyst for the next 10 years, and he spent much of 2023 preparing for his new role – studying the work of other analysts, consulting the wise old heads of the sport for tips on how best to manage the transition from field to commentary box, calling games live in private as practice. As if his godly playing reputation and the fortune Fox is giving him for his insights have not already raised expectations enough, Brady has also assumed the analytical position at a time when the pressure of comparison on Fox has perhaps never been greater. By stepping into the seat next to Burkhardt, Brady has displaced Greg Olsen, who drew rave reviews in the lead color role last season for his on-screen fluency, charm, and rare ability to blend narrative and data into a compelling explanatory whole.
Fox promoted their star recruit’s debut with bombastic relentlessness throughout the early games on Sunday, breaking away from coverage of whichever hapless teams happened to draw the 1pm short straw to bring essential footage of Brady fist-bumping Burkhardt and conversing with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in a pair of hitman sunglasses. An ad ending with the tagline “TOM BRADY IS BACK TO WORK” played on repeat, in which Brady’s former selves addressed the contemporary vintage and explained why it was so important for him to become a broadcaster even though he’s already fabulously rich. “What they don’t understand is, you live and breathe football because you’re Tom freakin’ Brady!” explains New England Patriots Brady to modern Brady in the ad.
Sunday’s Brady lovefest on Fox was so overwhelming and inescapable it eventually swallowed the very object of its affection, spilling over into a kind of televisual onanism. A new Tostito’s ad starring Brady and former teammate Julian Edelman aired during the Cowboys-Browns game; Fox split the screen to show Brady reacting to his own commercial, his face frozen into a rigid grin. All elite athletes are exhibitionists of some sort, but I wasn’t expecting “Tom Brady watches himself perform” to be a key component of Fox’s new Sunday football package.
The buildup was so grandiose that when the main event finally arrived it almost immediately seemed like a letdown. Burkhardt and Brady started brightly enough, a pair of jaws in the media box smiling through racks of gleaming teeth, but then Brady started talking. And that’s when things started to go wrong. Brady, the 199th overall pick in the 2000 NFL draft, once said that he was grateful to the New England Patriots for taking a chance on him because it meant he would not “have to be an insurance salesman”. He may have dodged a career in insurance, but unfortunately for football fans, Brady has very much not escaped having the voice of an insurance salesman. Burkhardt has a classic broadcast delivery that’s all honey; Brady, by contrast, is pure nose, and his weedy honk did nothing to allay the sense through the first minutes of Sunday’s game that, for perhaps the first time ever, the most successful quarterback of all time was feeling nervous. In that prepubescent squeak the words seemed to rush from Brady’s mouth in staccato bursts of verbiage that neither made sense on their own nor cohered into proper sentences: “Just a good example here – Parsons lining up – in different locations”.
Even when the words did emerge with more fluency the thoughts they contained were invariably dull and cliché-ridden: the stats sheet for Brady’s first half alone contained one “high IQ football”, at least three instances of “He’s just so athletic”, and a Dan Marino quote deployed as a broadcasting Hail Mary when it became despairingly obvious that Brady was approaching the end of a sentence with no natural thought on which to terminate it. Brady greeted KaVontae Turpin’s wonderful touchdown off a jagging 60-yard run with a wimpy “Oh!”, and his analysis of a first half sack by Micah Parsons was so generic it barely reached the analytical benchmark of a dad sinking beers on the couch: “This guy deals with more double teams than anyone. He’s just too athletic. This is what you deal with when you’re a great rusher. You get two on you, and you go: ‘You know what, put two on me, it doesn’t matter.’”
This was an on-screen debut with all the pizzazz of a Friday afternoon Zoom presentation from HR. Between spurts of lifeless banter with Burkhardt (they thought they’d be on camera more LOL!), Brady windbagged incessantly about the power and importance of “the organization”, especially in the context of Dak Prescott’s historic inability to get the most out of his obvious talent. “If you want to be a great player, you want to be pushed, you want to be challenged”, “discipline and accountability are mainstays in any successful organization”: there was a lot of stuff like this. And look, all of that may be true, as far as professional football goes at least, but it makes for terrifically boring TV.
Listening to these dweebily delivered hymns to organizational order it was hard to escape the sense that Brady is a real company guy, the kind of shirt-tucked-in narc who would call co-workers out for not showing up to the special “games day” employees were asked to attend on their day off. That spirit of discipline and loyalty might have worked for Brady as a player, but it doesn’t make him a compelling in-game analyst. To be fair, this first shift behind the mic wasn’t universally terrible – there were a few passable attempts to explain Prescott’s improvisational genius, and Brady showed no fear in deploying the on-screen highlighter – but it was all a bit drab. And if there’s one thing a color guy absolutely cannot be, it’s colorless.
Brady is a company man, even in his post-playing career: he’s already tied to Fox, and his bid to own 10% of the Las Vegas Raiders looks set to be approved by the league before the end of this season. The NFL has restricted Brady’s freedom of movement and expression on Fox given his impending move into ownership: he can’t say anything too critical about game officials, and he has no access to teams’ facilities and practice sessions. Would Brady be more interesting without these owner-in-waiting restrictions? It seems unlikely. When you’ve locked in hundreds of millions of dollars for a decade’s worth of honking in-game analysis, the incentive to savage players and officials is low to non-existent; the potential conflicts of interest are sidestepped before they even emerge. About the bravest thing Fox’s new headliner said on Sunday was this: “It’s hard to get 10 yards, it’s harder to get 15, very very hard to get 20.”
It’s early days, of course, and Brady still has 10 years to blossom into the role, plus a fortune to dull the pain of any criticism. But becoming a screen presence with even a 10th of the greatness he displayed as a player would involve doing things – developing a personality, for a start, or a willingness to criticize players and the league, or perhaps even a different voice – of which the seven-time Super Bowl champion seems incapable. The judgments already seem ready for the headstone. Tom Brady: indomitable quarterback, deft conflict of interest navigator, determined smiler, mediocre TV talent.
