Tom Brady will face one of the biggest tests of his career in the Super Bowl on Sunday. He is no longer charged with deciding games with his arm but he will be in the booth to analyze the game for an anticipated US audience of 120 million as Fox’s lead analyst.
For millions of those viewers, Sunday will be the first time they have heard from Brady since he played in a Super Bowl, was roasted on Netflix or was fodder for the tabloids. He will be tasked with navigating the longest broadcast of his career knowing that, with the Kansas City Chiefs chasing an unprecedented three-peat, his words will live in perpetuity. You can already foresee the social media outbursts and the heads slowly turning at your Super Bowl party: “Is that what Tom Brady sounds like? He is not very good at this, is he?”
Brady is in the first year of a 10-season, $375m contract with Fox, making him the highest-paid announcer in any sport. In his first season as a broadcaster, he earned more in the booth than all but eight of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks. But Brady’s move to the booth has been a dud. Even for a newbie on the mic, his lack of polish is startling.
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Brady’s broadcast debut back in September was an inoffensive mess. He was overprepared and overly eager, struggling to form coherent sentences and drenching the audience with banal cliches. Really, you were left wondering, these are the insights of the greatest to ever do it?
“It was too much, too quickly, too soon, to process into clear, effortless, fluid language,” Brady wrote in his 199 newsletter. “The god’s honest truth is that, like with anything complicated, the key to comfort and competence is just more reps.”
The problem is that Brady is not getting much better. There have been a scattering of improvements, but only in the way that switching from four slices of pizza a night to three improves your diet. There was a school of thought that Brady would peak towards the end of his first year. Surely, the thinking went, the league’s foremost competition-aholic will commit to being the best. But stock in Brady As A Broadcaster has taken a bigger beating than Hawk Tuah’s meme coin. He has shown few signs that he is willing or able to offer quick, detailed analysis or strong opinions, the bedrock of a solid in-game analysis. And something strange happened around the turn of the year: Brady’s performance bottomed out. As the stakes were rising, the once-great quarterback could not meet the moment.
Brady has a style that is all his own. For starters, he does not have a strong voice. But even that could be offset by fluid thoughts or a knack for reading the moment. Brady has shown neither. He speaks in a monotonous, staccato rhythm. Everything is pitched at a mild yell, without any of the natural rise and fall that revs through a stadium. He has all the presence of a network sitcom; fine as background noise but lacking the punch needed for career-altering postseason moments. No matter the situation, Brady usually speaks with one tone and one pace. And then, out of nowhere, without any context, he bursts into life. You can sense the hand of the producers, sliding in a note off-camera. It’s time to up the ante, Tom. That leads to baffling moments, where after 20 droning minutes, Brady pipes up. “He looks left … he looks right … then … he throws … A DOT!”
What is most startling, though, is what Brady does not say. Fox is ponying up $37.5m a year for the greatest quarterback of all time. The expectation was that he could break down the game in a way none of his peers could match, or at least rise to the industry standard while being backed up by the clout of seven Super Bowl rings, three MVP trophies and his status as the sport’s certified GOAT. But Brady the broadcaster seldom brings his unique knowledge to the Fox set. At times, he seems surprised that he has been asked to talk.
Brady’s most honest thoughts often come during the pauses he leaves between his words. Sloppy quarterback play grates him. But, because he is a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, and trying to maintain his polished, respectable sheen, you can hear him holding back. The best he could muster after a botched throw by Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts against Washington in the NFC championship game was a couple of deep exhales, before hitting his partner Kevin Burkhardt with: “You just have to have that play, KB.”
Brady has been hit with the problem that often plagues great players turned coaches: what is intuitive to him is not intuitive to everyone else. But rather than trying to bridge that divide, he simply refreshes the viewer on what they have seen. During the Eagles-Commanders game, the most successful player in league history was relegated to the role of the guy at the bar barking at the TV. Here is a sampling of his work, from a game with a Super Bowl berth on the line:
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“There is a lot on the line this game for both clubs”
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“I always hated playing defenses that played well”
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“The last thing Commanders fans wanted there was a fumble”
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“This game is about the games within the game”
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“In the playoffs, things are tougher”
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“This team needs more juice”
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“What a stud”
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“Now here is a stud”
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“They just have more studs”
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“The Eagles are playing with more juice”
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“They don’t have enough juice”
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“In the playoffs, it’s about the Jimmies and Joes”
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“That’s playoff football”
In one quarter, he uttered some variation of the word “juice” nine times. Given his penchant for brand deals, you would be forgiven for wondering if Brady had struck up a new partnership with Tropicana. Playing with more juice may be the shrewd judgment of a perennial champion who knows what it takes to lift a Lombardi, but having it serve as your go-to line makes for horrific TV. Once you catch the tics – “Good job, KB!” – there is no way to ignore them.
In fairness, Brady’s status as Fox’s lead analyst was undermined from the jump. The network bumped the excellent Greg Olsen down to their No 2 crew to clear a path for Brady, breaking apart the Burkhardt-Olsen pairing that had quickly become the best in the business. It was telling that during the NFC title game, Olsen offered more insight into the game on social media than Brady did from the booth. Olsen was talking strategy; Brady peppered the audience with platitudes.
But that has done little to dent Brady’s appeal to Fox. The network signed off on his record-breaking contract because of his value away from the games. People do not care about announcers. For the vast majority of viewers, it doesn’t matter if Romo, Shane Gillis or an AI Brady is on the call, they will still tune in. For the most part, broadcasters do not affect ratings – and Fox recognized that. Brady was brought in to be the face of the network’s sports coverage, helping Fox fend off the streaming vultures who were looking to swipe away rights packages from the traditional networks. Adding Brady helped ensure Fox would be a go-to destination for the sport through at least 2033.
“I think you start with credibility and with people that you think can bring something to the brand and the broadcast that nobody else can,” Fox executive Brad Zager told the Athletic about hiring Brady.
Related: Then and now: how do the Eagles and Chiefs compare to 2023’s Super Bowl?
Brand before broadcast, as Zager says. That’s the deal the networks make: the game is not the point, but the ad breaks between the action. In that sense, Brady is providing Fox with what the C-suite wants, retaining their rights packages and helping to close out ad campaigns on the golf course. But that has come at a cost to the audience. Part of Brady’s tepidness during games is because of a clear, awkward conflict of interest. Brady is not just an announcer but a part-owner of the Raiders. As the Chiefs and Eagles have been preparing to win a championship, Brady has been helping fire and hire coaches for the franchise he now partly runs. He called the Lions-Commanders playoff game around the time he was interviewing two of the Lions staff to be his head coach in Vegas. An audience deserves an announcer fully engaged in the role, and who is given the bandwidth to do the job effectively.
That is not Brady. As part of rules put in place by the NFL when he took an ownership stake in the Raiders, Brady is not allowed into another team’s facility. He cannot attend other teams’ practices or participate in production meetings with coaches, players and executives of any team whose game he’s calling. Those meetings may seem trivial – he’s Tom Brady! – but it’s in those discussions that analysts glean information that can drive a game’s narrative. During the AFC championship game, Tony Romo noted that the Chiefs’ defensive staff had told him about Josh Allen’s tendency to go backward before darting to his left on quarterback sneaks. It may have seemed like a small detail, but the Bills’ inability to convert those plays became the storyline of the game. Romo handed his audience the words and rationale to go along with the gut feeling that the Bills were being outcoached. Brady will not be able to pick up any similar points before the game on Sunday.
Still, no one alive should be better prepared to break down a Super Bowl. Brady played won seven of them, and he faced – and beat – most of the key protagonists for the Chiefs and Eagles as a player. Managing a Super Bowl Sunday is old hat to him. What is the best way to approach the extended half-time? What is it like to have an extra week to prepare? How do you mitigate the media circus?
Fox made a sizeable bet that Brady would offer memorable answers to those questions, learn on the job and shepherd the audience through what will be one of the defining games in league history. So far, that bet has been a bust. But Brady has delivered in the clutch before. Under a different kind of pressure, can he do it again?