Tom Brady likely hasn’t had very many bad years in his life, but it’s probably fair to assume that 2024 wasn’t one of his better ones.
After signing a 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox Sports to become the lead analyst on its NFL broadcasts, Brady, who is making more money per year to call the games than he ever was to play them, made his television debut to withering reviews. His unpolished demeanor, his tendency to shout like he’s in a huddle, his repeated usage of the word “good” as his most vivid descriptor (to the point that it began to feel like an incantation, or maybe his safe word), his banal, surface-level descriptions of the action on the field, his … oddly … inconSIStent vocal cadence, it all drove NFL fans and media critics batty from the second he started speaking. With Brady calling his first Super Bowl on Feb. 9, you can expect the Brady bashing, an obsession of NFL die-hards all year, to go fully normie: You’re about to hear your grandma say, “What in the world is he talking about?” It has been a year of full-on Brady backlash.
This has to feel unusual for Brady. While the future Hall of Famer certainly faced his fair share of haters as an active player — from offenses as varied as the Deflategate pseudo-scandal to the time he had a Make America Great Again hat in his locker — he also was insulated from most of it because of the quality of his play: He was, after all, the GOAT. But when you retire and enter the media world, you’re just another chump in a tie like the rest of us: It doesn’t matter how many touchdowns you can throw if you keep wandering off in the middle of your sentences on national television. Years of pent-up animosity toward Brady have been released.
It is worth noting that Brady isn’t the worst broadcaster in the world, though that may say more about the state of the profession than it does about him. He’s a rookie, after all, and ideally he would have had a year of calling lower-profile events so that he could improve before being unleashed on Super Bowl-viewing audiences. But you don’t dispatch Tom Brady to broadcast some nothing game. That Fox Sports paid him so much money meant it had to promote him as a star, which ultimately is what trapped him: He had to be great, immediately, and he wasn’t.
But more to the point: He had to be the Tom Brady we all remembered — a genius quarterback, the winner of seven Super Bowl rings, infallible. That was always going to end the minute he opened his mouth. It’s not because he’s an inherently terrible broadcaster. He’s just not the GOAT broadcaster. It turns out the skills of “winning seven Super Bowls” and “talking extemporaneously for four hours” are not directly connected. Brady’s broadcasting could never live up to his playing. Andy Rooney once wrote that he couldn’t be friends with his doctor because once he learned all the things in the world his doctor was bad at, he’d be unable to trust him as a doctor, either. “Once I saw him try to change a tire, I wasn’t going to let him near my triple bypass,” he said. This is Brady’s conundrum. Brady was revered as an athlete, but he’s an average to below-average broadcaster. And nothing about Tom Brady should ever contain the word “average.” We don’t want Tom Brady not to be great at something. Which is why this was always set up to fail.
It also doesn’t help that we do not want our legends to be human. All GOATs should have some mystery to them, some inherent distance between themselves and us mortals. Brady, frankly, should have known this. There is a reason Michael Jordan has never been a broadcaster. He only pops up to burnish his legend and remind young people who the real NBA GOAT is, and then he vanishes. That aloofness is essential. You don’t want to see Bob Dylan or Beyoncé hosting the Grammys or Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson hosting the Oscars. You have to let people miss you. This is particularly true for an athlete, who becomes exposed, the minute they retire, as what they truly now are: someone too old to do what they were most famous for. There’s a fine line between “Hall of Famer” and “washed-up guy who won’t stop talking about the old days.” That’s why Jordan is so smart to (mostly) remain silent. Let them remember how you were, not how you are.
Brady is a competitive person who worked his way up from being a backup (and nearly undrafted) college player to being widely considered the best football player who ever lived. He surely saw broadcasting as another challenge to be overcome, another opportunity to prove all the doubters wrong. (The $37.5 million a year probably didn’t hurt either.) He didn’t. The good news for Brady — and for the rest of us — is that despite that 10-year contract, I bet this experiment ends soon. Brady already has roaming eyes, becoming a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders and consulting on team and personnel matters, which, it should be said, is rather obviously a conflict of interest as a broadcaster. Brady spent this season getting yelled at by strangers, and your grandmother, in a way he has never been before. I suspect he is wise enough not to give them the privilege that much longer. There is glory in silence. For him — and for us.
Will Leitch is the author of the upcoming novel Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, a contributor at New York Magazine and founder of the late sports website Deadspin.
This story appeared in the Feb. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
