Critic’s Notebook: Tom Brady’s Super Bowl Announcing Debut Is Proof of Both Potential and Pitfalls
Halfway through the fourth quarter of one of the least competitive Super Bowls since my youth, with nothing new to say about the Philadelphia Eagles’ thorough decimation 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.
“Tell me about legacy and what the Chiefs are dealing with now,” Burkhardt prompted Tom Brady.
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Without hesitation, Brady spent the better part of the next 10 minutes — in a Super Bowl rout, time becomes relative — reflecting on the reasons he remembers his three Super Bowl losses more than his seven wins.
“I still haven’t really lived it down, because you care so deeply,” Brady said, speaking specifically of the loss to the Giants that ended what had been, up until that point, a historic 18-0 season.
“It’s the highest of highs when you’re trying to win and do something historic in the NFL and unfortunately it’s the lowest of lows,” Brady said, admitting that the morning after that first Giants loss, he woke up certain that the loss had been a bad dream — that the game was still to be played.
Every 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.
This was the Tom Brady you want to have on TV, the Tom Brady sharing an understanding of the moment that only Tom Brady possesses.
Of course, at no point this season has that been the Tom Brady viewers have gotten.
He’s faced complaints about his limited descriptive vocabulary. It’s not untrue. We all have fallback phrases and exhortations. Brady certainly does.
He’s faced complaints about his difficulties expressing enthusiasm. That’s a bit harder to quantify. I’ve 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.
He’s repeatedly faced complaints about not involving himself sufficiently in the action. That’s completely accurate. Look at Sunday’s 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’s not a fluid participant yet.
As I put it on BlueSky, “It’s 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 … Sonic the Hedgehog 4.”
He’s the greatest of all time at one thing and he hasn’t 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 ’00s and ’10s.
We 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’m watching a CBS game these days, chances are good that I’m watching on mute.
Tony Romo is worse now than when he started. I’m not just saying this as a Patriots fan of 30+ years, but I’m 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?
Analysts are hired for their conflicts of interest and their complicity in the sport they’re covering, but you ideally want it to be a backward-looking complicity or conflict of interest. It’s 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’s why you hire him.
What you don’t 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’s an active minority owner. To my mind, this probably means he shouldn’t be covering NFL games at all. He certainly shouldn’t be covering Raiders games; that’s obvious to everybody. He shouldn’t be covering games for any team scheduled to play the Raiders. But he also shouldn’t be covering games featuring future free agent players or assistant coaches who might be looking for other jobs down the line.
The fact that Fox has determined that Brady’s prestige outweighs the ethical concerns — and that the NFL seems to have no broader issues (there has been talk of contractual “restrictions” placed on him, but from week-to-week, it’s been hard to know what those restrictions were) — is slightly baffling.
Let’s get back, then, to Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl as an analyst after 10 Super Bowls assembling the resumé of the GOAT.
The lengthy, late-game therapy session was the best part of this Super Bowl performance, but it was far from his only highlight.
Brady’s pre-game interview with Patrick Mahomes was a conversation only those two men could have — minutes of easygoing game-recognize-game discussion of the pressure of reaching this kind of football pinnacle and then maintaining that position.
He didn’t hesitate to criticize the game’s 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’s eyes, though why would you want an analyst who can’t say when the refs blow a call?
Brady did a great job setting the foundation for the Chiefs’ offensive line struggles, critiquing Mahomes’ 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.
Brady 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.
But he wasn’t always able to do that.
Too often, as was the case all season, Brady filled time by stating the obvious, like: “There’s no 24-point touchdown.” There were too many plays where Brady’s contributions were restricted to, “Wow,” or other impressed, unilluminating nonverbal utterances.
There were too many long stretches when Brady was silent and waited for his partner to tap him in for a sentence or two.
And much as I praised Brady’s 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’s now fully contributed and can only repeat henceforth.
There were still too many times when Brady’s attempts to be natural and unaffected came across as, well, unnatural and thoroughly affected — like his spotting Kevin Hart in the crowd and opining, “How do the cameras find Kevin Hart?” He and Burkhardt then needed to backtrack and explain that this was a callback to all the jokes Hart made at Brady’s 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.
Then there was his observation as Eagles coach Nick Sirianni was doused in triumphant Gatorade.
“That’s gotta be a slimy, sticky shower.”
Sometimes, actually, silence is better.
These 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.
It’s hard to become the GOAT, and it’s hard to carry over that status into something where, for now, he’s just a guy. A very well-paid guy. Will Brady’s 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?
As a Tom Brady fan on the field and as an apologist for Brady’s general OK-ness in the booth, I’m prepared to show a modicum of patience.
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