Couldn't Brady and Belichick just have gone quietly?
The two pillars of the New England dynasty ruled the AFC for two decades. Now they seem intent on doing the same to the NFL's media
There were about five minutes left in the third quarter of Sunday’s game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Cleveland Browns, and the Browns were in trouble.
Cleveland was down 17 points, facing 4th-and-6 at midfield. They went for it. Quarterback Deshaun Watson took the snap, waited a beat too long, and was immediately under pressure. He was sacked. Disaster.
This was a fine opportunity for Tom Brady, in the Fox broadcast booth for the first time as an analyst, to provide some, well, analysis. Brady, the most accomplished quarterback of all time, was an absolute master at those high-leverage passing situations. He wasn’t mobile, which is normally what helps the QB in those instances, but he spread the field with receivers and seemed to always figure out which one was open in a blink. Snap, beat, throw, first down. And so: What had the Browns done wrong? Play call? Watson’s hesitation? Wrong package on the field?
Brady offered uncomfortable silence. In the moment after Kevin Burkhardt, the excellent play-by-play announcer, finished describing the action, when the analyst usually jumps in with some insight, Brady said nothing. Then they started a replay, and Brady awkwardly narrated what happened: Quick pressure, Watson sack. Nothing about why that might have happened, or what the Browns/Watson could have done to counter it.
This went on for pretty much the whole game. Periods of sustained quiet, followed by Brady stating something that was obvious: “Not a great throw there, Kevin,” as the ball sailed into the stands. Somewhere, a Fox executive must have been asking: we paid $375-million for this?
When Brady’s Fox deal was announced a couple years ago, while he was still playing for Tampa Bay, it raised all sorts of questions. The big one was why Fox would give so much money to someone who, even if he was a great analyst, wouldn’t really affect ratings. Even in the world of highly inflated NFL analyst deals, the Brady contract was bonkers. The prevailing theory is that Fox mostly wanted Brady so that he could be Tom Brady, Fox employee, at meet-and-greets with sponsors and advertisers. A few times a year, you trot him out to flash his smile and shake hands and everyone swoons. I don’t entirely get this argument. Yes, Brady would no doubt be a star in a room full of media buyers, but also the product that Fox is selling in that situation is NFL games. The most desirable television product in existence. Is Tom Brady adding that much value to negotiations? The other theory was that Fox signed Brady as a signal to the NFL that it wanted to be a continued partner in the next round of broadcast rights. Troy Aikman (and Joe Buck) had left Fox for ABC/ESPN and Monday Night Football, and CBS already had Tony Romo (and Jim Nantz) and Amazon had Al Michaels — so Fox needed something to show that it was still in the big leagues. Which, I dunno: Would the NFL really have dropped Fox as its NFC Sunday broadcaster because Greg Olsen wasn’t famous enough to be the lead anaylst?
Only Roger Goodell knows, I guess. The other question in all this is why Brady wanted to do it. He had never done any television work before agreeing to this high-profile job, and it’s not easy stuff. There’s a lot of travel, and as the evidence of his first game shows, live game coverage is demanding work. He’s also becoming a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, is a part-owner of Birmingham City in England, and has all kinds of business interests related to his health-products companies. Water, nutrition, sleepwear, you name it and TB12 has a possibly sketchy product for you. Given all that, wouldn’t a studio show have made more sense for Brady? Pop in for Sundays, fire off some takes, see you next week?
Evidently not. I don’t doubt that Brady will improve at the analyst role. But that’s partly because there’s only one way to go.
Brady’s media debut, in a funny bit of symmetry, came the same weekend as his old boss, Bill Belichick, started his media career. The Belichick arc is even more inexplicable: a notorious grouch with the press over his two decades of dominance with the New England Patriots, Belichick now seemingly can’t turn down any media gig. He’s appearing with the Manning brothers on their MNF broadcast, he has a role on the Pat McAfee show on ESPN, he’s on Sirius/XM radio, and the Inside the NFL studio show, and on something called Underdog Fantasy. He even has a vague role on something called the 33rd Team, which seems to be a betting/fantasy advice site. Oh, and he joined Instagram, with a self-deprecating (and exceedingly awkward) video in which he pretended not to know what he was doing.
The prevailing theory here is that Belichick wants to be a head coach again in 2025, and this is his way of keeping a foot in the door and reminding everyone that he a) knows football and b) is available.
And again, I don’t quite get it. Why so many gigs? If Belichick thinks he really needs to be in the media to remind prospective team owners that he exists — which seems VERY unlikely for a man with six Super Bowl rings — why not just dip a toe in the water? Did the experience of last winter, when he was unemployed and didn’t get many job interviews, make him think that he has to convince people all over again that he knows football? Because, again, I do not think the NFL in general imagines that he has lost it. Why not take a few months off and wait for the inevitable offers to start coming in?
The explanation might well be that, for him and Brady both, you don’t win all those Super Bowls by sitting with your feet up, expecting good things to happen. They are putting in the work, because that’s what they do.
Programming note
I’m going to start doing a weekly post that rounds up things that were published elsewhere, including those that I have written, rather than tacking the links at the end of a post, by which point you may not be all that interested in reading something new and unrelated. I’ll probably do this more toward the end of the week, but I’m sitting on a bit of a backlog now so will be doing the first of these tomorrow.