Oct 5, 2025; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; Former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees smiles prior to the game against the New York Giants at Caesars Superdome. Credit: Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images
By Sam Neumann on

Drew Brees gets his second chance Sunday.

The former Saints quarterback will make his Fox debut alongside Adam Amin for Packers-Giants at MetLife Stadium, joining Fox’s No. 4 team after Mark Sanchez was arrested on felony battery charges last month. It’s Brees’ first NFL booth job since his one forgettable season at NBC ended in 2022.

Fox made it official Friday, with Brad Zager calling Brees “one of the best to ever play the game” and expressing excitement about adding him to the lineup. Brees said the standard stuff about his passion for football and providing insights to fans.

The debut comes with a nice bit of symmetry. Jameis Winston starts at quarterback for the Giants after Jaxson Dart’s concussion, meaning Brees will call a game featuring his former backup from New Orleans. Winston sat behind Brees in 2020 before replacing him as the Saints’ starter the following year.

But the real story is whether Brees has figured out broadcasting in the four years since NBC gave up on him.

Brees joined NBC immediately after retiring in 2021, with expectations he’d eventually slide into Cris Collinsworth’s Sunday Night Football seat. Instead, he called Notre Dame games on Saturdays and worked the Football Night in America studio show. NBC threw him into a playoff game that January — the Raiders vs. Bengals on Wild Card weekend — and it went poorly. Brees offered little beyond basic quarterback observations, stayed quiet during big moments, and got roasted for bringing nothing to a broadcast watched by nearly 28 million people.

By May, both sides agreed to part ways. NBC’s Pete Bevacqua framed it as a lifestyle choice, saying Brees wanted more time with his family. Brees initially posted about being “undecided” on his future, floating the possibility he might even play again.

Since then, Brees has kept insisting he can be great at this. He told Dan Patrick in August that he’d “step in the booth right now and be a top-three guy” in the NFL, claiming people had the wrong perception of his NBC stint since he only called two games eight weeks apart.

Maybe he’s right. Joe Buck told Richard Deitsch last year that Brees “got a raw deal” and should’ve been given more time to develop. First-year broadcasters rarely nail it immediately, and NBC threw Brees into a playoff spotlight after a year of calling college games to a fraction of the audience.

Or maybe Brees just wasn’t good enough then and still isn’t now. Fox is about to find out.

The network needed bodies after cutting ties with Sanchez, and Brees was available. He’s paired with Amin, who’s a strong play-by-play voice, on what appears to be Fox’s fourth team behind Kevin Burkhardt-Tom Brady, Joe Davis-Greg Olsen, and Kevin Kugler-Daryl Johnston. That’s a long way from where Brees probably thought he’d be at this point, but it’s also a chance to prove he’s more than just another quarterback who couldn’t hack it in the booth.

Whether Brees has actually improved over the past four years is the question Fox just bet on. Sunday’s the first chance to find out if the answer is yes.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann