As another Kansas City Chiefs offensive drive was falling apart just moments after A.J. Brown’s 12-yard touchdown catch pushed the Philadelphia Eagles’ lead to 24-0 in the final minutes of Super Bowl LIV’s first half, Kevin Burkhardt asked Tom Brady the most obvious of questions.
“If you’re the Chiefs right now, where do you start?” Fox’s play-by-play man asked his broadcast partner.
“Yeah, it’s a great question,” Brady answered. “Not much has worked.”
You don’t say.
To be fair to Brady, his answer didn’t stop there, as he noted that Kansas City was struggling to establish the run, which was technically true. But the thought was hardly timely, considering the Eagles were about to take a three-touchdown lead into halftime. It also did not necessarily answer Burkhardt’s answer or draw on his own experience as the author of the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.
In fact, listening to Brady’s broadcasting debut in the big game, you wouldn’t have known he had ever played a Super Bowl before—let alone won seven of them—until he waxed poetic about his experience with the game being well out of hand late in the fourth quarter.
To be clear, Brady wasn’t completely bad; one could argue he was perfectly serviceable. But he was closer to the game manager who led the Patriots to their first three Lombardi Trophies rather than the NFL MVP who won three more before leaving New England and adding another with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for good measure.
In a vacuum, Brady is just fine as a broadcaster, the type of analyst you wouldn’t bat an eye at if he was calling a second-tier Big Ten game on a random Saturday afternoon in October. Except this wasn’t a random Saturday in the fall; it was the freaking Super Bowl.
With his first season as a broadcaster officially over, it would be tough to argue that he lived up to the hype.
That’s not to say Brady didn’t show potential, as it was just two weeks ago I wrote that the 47-year-old was hitting his stride heading into the Super Bowl. The three-time NFL MVP had seemingly found his niche, drawing on his experience of having played in more big games than any quarterback in the history of football, and had even managed to thread the needle of criticizing quarterbacks without admonishing them for not being him.
For whatever reason, however, that version of Brady was nowhere to be found in New Orleans — at least not at the Caesars Superdome on Sunday. Whatever energy he showed during his semi-regular hit on The Herd leading up to the game was zapped out of him come kickoff, replaced by a low-energy analyst who seemed more than happy to let Burkhardt — who turned in one of his best performances of the season — do the heavy lifting.
Again, Brady wasn’t bad — at least not in the traditional sense where he had noticeable flubs or didn’t sound like he knew what he was talking about. But he certainly wasn’t good, especially when considering the magnitude of the moment or that he replaced the near-universally beloved NFL analyst Greg Olsen in Fox’s top booth.
Rather, Brady was very much just kind of…. there, happy to answer Burkhardt’s prompts during what at times felt more like a four-hour interview than it did two broadcasters calling a game.
It’s also notable that while the 15-time Pro Bowl selection was eager to criticize the officials on a couple of early calls — which surely earned him some brownie points with most viewers — he was hardly critical of Patrick Mahomes during what may have very well been the worst game of the Chiefs quarterback’s career.
Perhaps the best analysis of Brady’s was by comedian Frank Caliendo, who noted the Michigan product’s lack of foresight.
I’d love for Tom Brady to give us some insight into why something might happen instead of always telling us what we just saw.
— Frank Caliendo (@FrankCaliendo) February 10, 2025
Many will surely write off the underwhelming nature of Brady’s Super Bowl broadcasting debut to the game being a blowout, which certainly didn’t do him any favors. But the problem with such excuse-making is that the vast majority of his first season at Fox possessed many of the same flaws, so it was hardly a surprise to hear him awkwardly joke about the “blurs” of Bourbon Street or describe Mahomes flipping the ball to Travis Kelce three feet in front of him as “a little inhuman.”
As I wrote following his Thanksgiving Day showcase, Brady isn’t a fit for the broadcasting booth, and save for a few recent glimmers of hope, there hasn’t been much to change my mind. That’s not to say he can’t improve in Year 2 (or Years 3-10). But the reality of his stature, his contract, and who he replaced is that he doesn’t get the luxury of being a work in progress.
Rather, nobody would blame Fox for reinstalling Olsen next to Burkhardt in its top booth and shifting Brady to its Fox NFL Sunday pregame show, which is ripe for a makeover given Jimmy Johnson and Terry Bradshaw‘s uncertain futures. As his hits on shows like The Herd have shown, Brady is at his best in such settings, even if they don’t carry the same prestige that calling the Super Bowl does to many.
I’m not expecting that to happen, though, as all involved parties appear committed to making Brady work in the broadcast booth. Year 1, however, left enough to be desired that the network should at least consider a solution that would be as obvious as Brady’s analysis was at times on Sunday.
