AAs the Cowboys’ third quarter of dismissal of the Browns got underway on Sunday afternoon, Fox play-by-play host Kevin Burkhardt turned to his new on-air partner Tom Brady for advice on what Cleveland needed to do to breathe life into their limp offense. “How do they move the ball and get something going here?” Burkhardt asked, a question about which the man widely regarded as the greatest quarterback of all time would presumably have an original thought or two to offer the viewers at home. With a confident nod, Brady responded, “To get ahead, they’ve got to stop getting back.” Burkhardt laughed, but you could tell from the look in his eyes that he was crying inside. Is this what $375 million buys you these days?
Brady’s TV debut was perhaps the most anticipated sports broadcast event of the year, a story the media covered with breathtaking intensity in the lead-up to NFL kickoff weekend. The former New England Patriots legend signed a $375 million deal with Fox in 2022 to become its lead Sunday football analyst for the next 10 years, and he spent much of 2023 prepare for his new role—studying the work of other analysts, consulting the game’s wise old heads for tips on how best to transition from field to booth, watching games live in private for practice. As if his godlike reputation as a player and the fortune Fox gives him for his insights weren’t enough of an expectation, Brady has also stepped into the analytics position at a time when the pressure of comparison on Fox has perhaps never been greater. In taking the seat next to Burkhardt, Brady has replaced Greg Olsen, who earned critical acclaim in the lead role last season for his screen fluency, charm and rare ability to blend story and data into a compelling explanatory whole.
Fox promoted its star player’s debut with bombastic tirelessness during the first few games on Sunday, cutting out coverage of whatever hapless teams happened to draw the short straw at 1 p.m. to show essential footage of Brady fist-bumping Burkhardt and chatting with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in a pair of hitman sunglasses. An ad that ended with the tagline “TOM BRADY IS BACK TO WORK” played repeatedly, with Brady’s former self addressing the modern-day vintage and explaining why it was so important to him to become an announcer, even though he is already fabulously wealthy. “What they don’t understand is that you live and breathe football because you are Tom freakin’ Brady!” New England Patriots Brady explains to modern-day Brady in the ad.
Sunday’s Brady love affair on Fox was so overwhelming and inevitable that it eventually consumed the object of his affections and devolved into a kind of televised onanism. A new Tostitos 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 ad, his face frozen in a stiff grin. All great athletes are exhibitionists to one degree or another, but I didn’t expect “Tom Brady Watching Himself Perform” to be a major part of Fox’s new Sunday football package.
The buildup was so grand that it almost seemed like a letdown when the main event finally arrived. Burkhardt and Brady started out cheerfully enough, a few 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 he was grateful to the New England Patriots for taking a chance on him because it meant he “didn’t have to be an insurance salesman.” He may have dodged a career in insurance, but unfortunately for football fans, Brady has not escaped having the voice of an insurance salesman. Burkhardt has a classic delivery that’s all honey; Brady, by contrast, is all nose, and his weedy honking did nothing to ease the feeling in the opening minutes of Sunday’s game that, for perhaps the first time ever, the most accomplished quarterback in history was feeling nervous. In that prepubescent squeak, the words seemed to come out of Brady’s mouth in staccato bursts of words that neither made sense on their own nor could be put together into proper sentences: “Just a good example of this – Parsons setting up in different locations.”
Even when the words flowed more smoothly, the thoughts they contained were invariably dull and clichéd: The stat sheet for Brady’s first half alone contained one “high IQ football,” “He’s just so athletic” at least three times, and a quote from Dan Marino that was used as a Hail Mary when it became desperately clear that Brady was nearing the end of a sentence without a natural thought of how to end it. Brady greeted KaVontae Turpin’s stunning touchdown after a 60-yard run with a limp “Oh!”, and his analysis of a first-half sack by Micah Parsons was so general that it barely rose to the analytical standard of a father drinking beer on the couch: “This guy’s been double-teamed more than anybody in the game. He’s just too athletic. This is what you deal with when you’re a great rusher. You get two on you, and you say, ‘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 of HR. In between bursts of lifeless banter with Burkhardt (they thought they’d be on camera more LOL!), Brady harped endlessly on about the power and importance of “the organization,” especially in the context of Dak Prescott’s historical inability to make the most 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 pillars of any successful organization”—there was a lot of that stuff. And look, that may all be true, at least as far as professional football is concerned, but it makes for terribly boring TV.
Listening to these dweebly delivered anthems to organizational order, it was hard to escape the feeling that Brady was a true company man, the kind of shirt-tucked buffoon who would harangue coworkers for failing to show up for the special “game day” employees were required to attend on their days off. That spirit of discipline and loyalty may 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 at explaining Prescott’s improvisational genius, and Brady showed no fear in deploying the on-screen highlighter—but it was all a bit dull. And if there’s one thing a man of color absolutely cannot be, it’s colorless.
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Brady is a business man, even in his post-playing career: he’s already tied to Fox, and his bid to own 10% of the Las Vegas Raiders appears to be approved by the league before the end of the season. The NFL has restricted Brady’s freedom of movement and expression on Fox in light of his impending ownership move: He’s not allowed to say anything critical of game officials, and he’s denied access to team facilities and practice sessions. Would Brady be more interesting without these restrictions from the would-be owner? It seems unlikely. When you’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a decade of blatant in-game analysis, the incentive to criticize players and officials is low to nonexistent; the potential conflicts of interest are sidestepped before they even arise. 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, it’s really hard to get 20.”
It’s still early, of course, and Brady has 10 years to blossom into the role, plus a fortune to soften the sting of criticism. But becoming a screen presence with even a tenth of the greatness he displayed as a player would require things — developing a personality, for starters, or a willingness to criticize players and the league, or maybe even a different voice — that the seven-time Super Bowl champion seems incapable of. The verdicts seem set for the gravestone. Tom Brady: indomitable quarterback, deft navigator of conflicts of interest, determined laugher, mediocre TV talent.