Fans of 30 other NFL franchises can be excused if they didn’t foresee Tom Brady getting better in the broadcast booth.
Most neither expected nor wanted him to. He’d succeeded so often against their preferred team for two decades as a player that a broad range of NFL fans were rooting for him to fail when he joined Kevin Burkhardt in Fox’s No. 1 broadcast booth before the 2024 season. Seven Super Bowl victories can spark a whole lot of envy.
But here in New England, and I suppose in the Tampa/St. Petersburg region as well, we should have known better — and known he’d get better after an inauspicious start.
On Sunday, Brady will come to Gillette Stadium, the backdrop for so many extraordinary moments and performances during his 20 seasons with the Patriots, for the first time as a broadcaster.
In one sense, this feels overdue — this is, after all, his third year in the Fox booth.
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The network had considered sending Brady and Burkhardt to Foxborough for a Week 5 matchup with the Dolphins in 2024. But the Patriots were 1-3 and lousy when the game rolled around. The Chris Myers/Mark Sanchez/Kristina Pink team got the assignment instead.
Last season, when Drake Maye and the Patriots sneaked up on the league with a 14-3 regular-season record, Fox had four Patriots broadcasts, including in Weeks 17 (Jets) and 18 (Dolphins), but never sent its top team.
So Brady’s first game as a broadcaster at the place he knows so well comes Sunday.
And in another sense, it does feel like the ideal time.
Rob Gronkowski, who was on the receiving end of some of Brady’s most memorable throws, is being inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame Saturday, and will be celebrated during halftime Sunday. The 2016 Super Bowl champions will be honored, as well.
And in his new career, or at least one of them, Brady arrives at the top of his game.
If I were ranking the high-profile NFL color analysts at this point, I’d go with Greg Olsen — who was bumped to Fox’s No. 2 team because of Brady — as the best. ESPN’s Troy Aikman remains close to that top spot, but the fissures in his relationship with longtime broadcast partner Joe Buck have led to a distracting awkwardness to the Monday night broadcast.
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Brady? He’s at worst third, and he has a case for bumping Aikman down the depth chart.
In his first season in the booth, Brady was clearly overstuffed with information, partially from overstudying every NFL broadcaster he could think of (John Madden, Tony Romo, Cris Collinsworth, maybe even Beasley Reece) during his year hiatus after retiring. That led to him trying to cram in everything on his mind during the small window between plays.
When he wasn’t saying too much, Brady sometimes had nothing to say at all. His first broadcast was a 2024 Browns-Cowboys game. When the Cowboys went into halftime with a 20-3 lead, Brady said of the Browns, “We’ll see if they make adjustments.” His role, of course, was to tell us exactly what those adjustments should be.
Two seasons later, Brady has become excellent company on the broadcast, primarily because he’s figured out what his strength is — he can instantly articulate what the quarterback is seeing, what he should be seeing, and whether he did the right thing on a given play.
Brady’s play-by-play assessments of Drake Maye’s decision-making on Sunday are going to be fascinating. His gravitas is such that whatever he says about Maye is going to stick.
Brady is also surprisingly candid, even blunt. His repeated questioning of the officiating in the Week 7 matchup between the Lions and Packers drew plenty of attention, in part because as a minority owner (of the Raiders), he is barred from criticizing officials.
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Maybe Brady was aware of that and maybe he wasn’t, but his incredulousness during that broadcast struck the right tone on multiple occasions, particularly during a roughing-the-passer call on the Packers’ Karl Brooks in the fourth quarter.
“Oh my goodness, what is that?” said Brady “There’s no way! … It’s a bang-bang play. He rolls off his body. It’s a great throw by [Jared] Goff. It’s definitely not roughing the passer.”
In recent seasons — since he retired, really — it’s been tough to gauge how much warmth Brady feels for the Patriots and New England. His “I don’t have a dog in the fight” comment before the Patriots’ matchup with the Seahawks in Super Bowl LX rubbed many Patriots fans the wrong way.
Perhaps some of those fences will be mended with the Gronk/2016 fiestas.
But when the game is being played, Brady will be objective and informative, and we’ll want to hear what he has to say.
He’s worked hard, and he’s come a long way.
It’s what Tom Brady does, and we should have known that would apply to broadcasting the game just as it did when he was playing it.