Tom Brady is hitting every corner of the NFC East to start his second season in the Fox booth.
Fox had already confirmed Brady and Kevin Burkhardt would call Week 1’s Commanders-Giants and then follow that up with the Week 2 “America’s Game of the Week,” a Super Bowl LIX rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs. Now, as first reported by The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch, Brady will cap off his early-season NFC East run with a Cowboys game in Week 3 against the Bears, though Fox hasn’t officially announced it yet.
Fox has long leaned on the Cowboys as its late-afternoon anchor in the coveted 4:25 p.m. Sunday time slot, which is generally the most-watched window of the weekend. Year after year, Dallas reliably brings in viewers no matter what, making them the go-to team for that slot. But this season, Fox pushed for more variety in those late afternoon windows.
Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill told Deitsch earlier this year that the network is actually fine dialing back on Cowboys games in that slot to spotlight a broader range of contenders — including the Lions, Eagles, and Commanders — as well as more AFC teams led by star quarterbacks.
“Of our 4:25 p.m. games, only three of them are Cowboys games,” Mulvihill said. “In other years, we’ve gone looking for five or six Dallas games at 4:25. What we wanted for this year was more AFC, more Philly, but also more Detroit and a little more Washington to try to capitalize on the Jayden Daniels story. I think we have a better mix of teams than we’ve had in the past. Sometimes we’ve heard exasperation from fans that the Fox 4:25 game is always the Cowboys. It’s still gonna be the Cowboys sometimes this year, but you’ll see a little bit more variety in terms of top teams in our 4:25 window.”
In Brady’s first three games last season, he called the Cowboys. It wasn’t until Week 4 that he finally stepped away from Dallas. Maybe now, with fewer Cowboys games on his schedule, we’ll see the Brady who calls it like he sees it — The Herd guest Brady, instead of the version hesitant to critique players.
To be clear, he hasn’t exactly held back on critiquing the Cowboys. But maybe that’s a trade-off some fans are willing to make, given how tired many have grown of seeing Dallas dominate every late-afternoon window week after week.