In his Super Bowl broadcasting debut, Fox analyst Tom Brady showed a surprising willingness to critique NFL referees and also tried to give Patrick Mahomes advice for staging a comeback.
There had been a lot of buildup to Brady’s first Super Bowl outing after signing a reported $375 million contract with Fox, especially after the color analyst drew mixed reviews in a mistake-filled rookie year. The game quickly became lopsided, removing some of the scrutiny, with the Philadelphia Eagles leading the Kansas City Chiefs, 40-6, late in the fourth quarter.
“You’ve got to just inch your way back,” Brady said when the Chiefs were down by three scores. “There’s no 24-point play.”
Brady earned one of his record seven Super Bowl rings by engineering an historic comeback, leading the New England Patriots to a win after they trailed the Atlanta Falcons, 28-3, late in the third quarter.
While Brady criticized Mahomes for “ill-advised throws” on two consecutive passes that were intercepted by the Eagles, he said he “won’t flinch” because of his “competitiveness.”
A lot of the social media reaction to Brady focused on football pundits assessing his legacy versus where Mahomes could end up at the end of his career. A win would have given Mahomes a third straight title, and four overall, at the age of 29.
Early on, before the game became a blowout, Brady aimed some surprising arrows at the game officials. When Eagles receiver was flagged for pass interference with the game still 0-0 early in the first quarter, it seemed possible that the recent debate about officiating of Chiefs games would rear its head. Few on-air NFL analysts aside from ESPN’s Troy Aikman are generally willing to criticize the refs, and one of the knocks on Brady has been his pulling of punches in that area.
“Aw, don’t like that one bit,” he said. “This is too critical of a game. The hand fighting is going on all the way down the field.” Mike Pereira, Fox’s rules analyst agreed, “I think it’s one that did not need to be called.”
Brady kept on. “I always felt in these games, you should let the players play. It should be decided on the field,” he said. Later in the period, he ripped the officials for calling a dubious pass interference penalty on the Chiefs.
While some of the critiques of Brady’s performance during the season faulted him for being uptight, he showed a sense of humor (or a semblance of one) at various times during the game. When the 5-foot-4 Kevin Hart, emcee of the Netflix roast of Brady, was shown on the broadcast, the ex-QB cracked, “Kevin Hart’s here? How do the cameras find Kevin Hart?”
Even during commercial breaks, viewers got plenty of Brady. The Fox host appeared in an ad batteries, with the bit being that he was a humanoid robot powered by batteries.
During a media conference call days before the game, Brady reflected on how much has gone into his effort to improve in the booth.
“There’s been such a learning curve from, I would say, that game to where we all are now,” he said of a trial run on a UFL game last spring. “I think the mistakes that I’ve made, and I’ve made plenty, I’ve learned from all of them. And that’s just the way that it continues to go.”
