{"id":167250,"date":"2025-06-29T07:25:19","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T07:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/167250\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T07:25:19","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T07:25:19","slug":"review-of-tom-brady-calling-super-bowl-2025-on-fox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/167250\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Tom Brady Calling Super Bowl 2025 on Fox"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHalfway through the fourth quarter of one of the least competitive Super Bowls since my youth, with nothing new to say about the Philadelphia Eagles\u2019 thorough decimation<\/a> of the Kansas City Chiefs, play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt decided it was time to let his booth partner go to therapy in front of a billion viewers worldwide.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTell me about legacy and what the Chiefs are dealing with now,\u201d Burkhardt prompted Tom Brady<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout hesitation, Brady spent the better part of the next 10 minutes \u2014 in a Super Bowl rout, time becomes relative \u2014 reflecting on the reasons he remembers his three Super Bowl losses more than his seven wins.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI still haven\u2019t really lived it down, because you care so deeply,\u201d Brady said, speaking specifically of the loss to the Giants that ended what had been, up until that point, a historic 18-0 season.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s the highest of highs when you\u2019re trying to win and do something historic in the NFL and unfortunately it\u2019s the lowest of lows,\u201d Brady said, admitting that the morning after that first Giants loss, he woke up certain that the loss had been a bad dream \u2014 that the game was still to be played.<\/p>\n

\n\tEvery once in a while, Burkhardt interjected to mention things that were happening in the game, but he knew as well as anybody that what was on the field had become uninteresting and what was happening in the booth was candid and human. It was the first time in a long, long game that the greatest quarterback to ever play was giving viewers a taste of why Fox paid him a reported $375 million to jump from the field to the booth.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis was the Tom Brady you want to have on TV, the Tom Brady sharing an understanding of the moment that only Tom Brady possesses.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, at no point this season has that been the Tom Brady viewers have gotten.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s faced complaints about his limited descriptive vocabulary. It\u2019s not untrue. We all have fallback phrases and exhortations. Brady certainly does.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s faced complaints about his difficulties expressing enthusiasm. That\u2019s a bit harder to quantify. I\u2019ve found him consistently engaged, and he expresses enthusiasm in his own way. If he became a rah-rah cheerleader, then people would claim he was forcing his enthusiasm and criticize him for that.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s repeatedly faced complaints about not involving himself sufficiently in the action. That\u2019s completely accurate. Look at Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl and count the number of times Burkhardt had to specifically goad him to give responses, to set him up for thoughts that a more natural analyst would jump into instinctively. He\u2019s not a fluid participant yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs I put it on BlueSky<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s like if Meryl Streep announced that she was finally ready to direct a movie, using all of the combined wisdom from her acclaimed acting career, and that movie was, like \u2026 Sonic the Hedgehog 4.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s the greatest of all time at one thing and he hasn\u2019t proven to be the greatest of all time yet at his second thing. So some folks take pleasure in tearing him to shreds, in part because Brady has been one of the easiest people in the world to dislike since the moment he went from being an under-drafted rookie out of Michigan to steering the great sports dynasty of the \u201900s and \u201910s.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe want and need for announcers to have the ability to improve. Or not! When Tony Romo moved from the Cowboys into the CBS booth, I thought he was instantly tremendous and I would seek out the games he was calling because I enjoyed his insight and his Kreskin-like gift when it comes to predicting plays seconds in advance. Several years later, somebody clearly urged Romo to do more predicting and less analyzing, and that has become the foundation for what he does rather than an appealing flourish. If I\u2019m watching a CBS game these days, chances are good that I\u2019m watching on mute.<\/p>\n

\n\tTony Romo is worse now than when he started. I\u2019m not just saying this as a Patriots fan of 30+ years, but I\u2019m confident that if Tom Brady is still in the booth in five years, he will be better than he was this season. But should he still be in the booth in five years?<\/p>\n

\n\tAnalysts are hired for their conflicts of interest and their complicity in the sport they\u2019re covering, but you ideally want it to be a backward-looking complicity or conflict of interest. It\u2019s good TV for Brady to cover a game featuring the Giants so you can show clips from multiple heartbreaking Super Bowl losses, and it was good TV for Brady to have to respond to a cutaway of Brady-vanquisher Nick Foles during an earlier Eagles playoff game. You want Brady to tell stories about the coaches he played under and the former teammates now working as coaches. That\u2019s why you hire him.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat you don\u2019t want is forward-looking and present-tense complicity or conflicts of interest. Brady is a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, but reports suggest he\u2019s an active minority owner. To my mind, this probably means he shouldn\u2019t be covering NFL games at all. He certainly shouldn\u2019t be covering Raiders games; that\u2019s obvious to everybody. He shouldn\u2019t be covering games for any team scheduled to play the Raiders. But he also shouldn\u2019t be covering games featuring future free agent players or assistant coaches who might be looking for other jobs down the line. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe fact that Fox has determined that Brady\u2019s prestige outweighs the ethical concerns \u2014 and that the NFL seems to have no broader issues (there has been talk of contractual \u201crestrictions\u201d placed on him, but from week-to-week, it\u2019s been hard to know what those restrictions were) \u2014 is slightly baffling.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s get back, then, to Tom Brady\u2019s first Super Bowl as an analyst after 10 Super Bowls assembling the resum\u00e9 of the GOAT.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lengthy, late-game therapy session was the best part of this Super Bowl performance, but it was far from his only highlight.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrady\u2019s pre-game interview with Patrick Mahomes was a conversation only those two men could have \u2014 minutes of easygoing game-recognize-game discussion of the pressure of reaching this kind of football pinnacle and then maintaining that position.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe didn\u2019t hesitate to criticize the game\u2019s first two penalties, urging officials to let the game play out without interference. This pushback against the referees possibly violated his Fox contract in some people\u2019s eyes, though why would you want an analyst who can\u2019t say when the refs blow a call?<\/p>\n

\n\tBrady did a great job setting the foundation for the Chiefs\u2019 offensive line struggles, critiquing Mahomes\u2019 increasingly erratic footwork as the pocket collapsed around him just one play before pressure contributed to a key Mahomes interception. This is a thing that all great announcers do: introducing a narrative and then tracing its elements as the game progresses.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrady later had some good banter with rules official Mike Pereira, joking about how he used to get worked up during games, but only received two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in his entire career. The game was pure garbage time by that point, but Brady found something he could do that would add levity and avoid awkward silence.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut he wasn\u2019t always able to do that.<\/p>\n

\n\tToo often, as was the case all season, Brady filled time by stating the obvious, like: \u201cThere\u2019s no 24-point touchdown.\u201d There were too many plays where Brady\u2019s contributions were restricted to, \u201cWow,\u201d or other impressed, unilluminating nonverbal utterances.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were too many long stretches when Brady was silent and waited for his partner to tap him in for a sentence or two.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd much as I praised Brady\u2019s personal insight into losing a Super Bowl with history on the line, those galling defeats have come up at various points this season and his candor has been roughly the same each time, suggesting that his most valuable asset is something he\u2019s now fully contributed and can only repeat henceforth.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were still too many times when Brady\u2019s attempts to be natural and unaffected came across as, well, unnatural and thoroughly affected \u2014 like his spotting Kevin Hart in the crowd and opining, \u201cHow do the cameras find Kevin Hart?\u201d He and Burkhardt then needed to backtrack and explain that this was a callback to all the jokes Hart made at Brady\u2019s expense during the Netflix roast. By the time the joke had been run into the ground, a man with less confidence probably would have crawled under the desk in embarrassment.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there was his observation as Eagles coach Nick Sirianni was doused in triumphant Gatorade.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s gotta be a slimy, sticky shower.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSometimes, actually, silence is better.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese are just things that Brady will need to learn from and adapt to, mistakes that even trolls on social media would let slide from a less revered (and reviled) former athlete.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s hard to become the GOAT, and it\u2019s hard to carry over that status into something where, for now, he\u2019s just a guy. A very well-paid guy. Will Brady\u2019s hunger for greatness inspire him to keep refining this new skill set until even the doubters reluctantly admit that there are benefits to listening to a legend blather? Or will he shift his focus more and more toward the long journey to get the Raiders back to the Super Bowl?<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a Tom Brady fan on the field and as an apologist for Brady\u2019s general OK-ness in the booth, I\u2019m prepared to show a modicum of patience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Halfway through the fourth quarter of one of the least competitive Super Bowls since my youth, with nothing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2068],"tags":[25,7,6,242,109,2476,5352,10302,1369],"class_list":{"0":"post-167250","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-eagles","8":"tag-eagles","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-philadelphia-eagles","13":"tag-philadelphiaeagles","14":"tag-super-bowl-2025","15":"tag-super-bowl-lix","16":"tag-tom-brady"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114765466191093866","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}