Super Bowl 2025: Tom Brady is a winner in his first Super Bowl as Fox analyst
Tom Brady, right, arrives prior to the Super Bowl between Kansas City and the Philadelphia Eagles, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans. Credit: AP/Frank Franklin II
Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl with an upset of the Rams in New Orleans after the 2001 season, when he still was an unproven young sixth-round draft pick.
Everything he did then was a revelation, and he was America’s underdog darling.
On Sunday, he returned to the Superdome with seven rings in his collection and 100 million-plus skeptical viewers waiting to see how his new career might look.
Turned out, it looked pretty good.
Brady seemed comfortable, prepared and knowledgeable in his first Super Bowl as a Fox analyst for the Eagles’ 40-22 rout of Kansas City in Super Bowl LIX.
He did not enjoy the benefit of a close game, which announcers always prefer, forcing him to do some creative vamping in the final minutes.
But Brady seemed at ease from the start — perhaps benefiting from warming up all day with multiple appearances on Fox’s 5 ½ hours of pregame programming.
Does he have the personality pizzazz of a John Madden, who worked that first Super Bowl that Brady won in New Orleans? Of course not.
Is he as sharp as Greg Olsen, the man who called Fox’s previous Super Bowl two years earlier and whom Brady supplanted in the lead booth? No. Not yet, anyway.
But unlike Olsen, Brady is, well, Tom Brady — the Greatest of All Time, now more than ever after Patrick Mahomes’ poor outing on Sunday.
Brady does not have to be great at TV. Again, he is Tom Brady. He merely has to be a professional, competent, non-annoying companion for viewers. He was all of that on Sunday.
And he figures to only get better. He was stilted and nervous when the season began and kept growing on the job. He figures to be better next year and the year after that.
Brady established himself early with a strong take on what at the time seemed like a key officiating decision.
Even though during the week he had pooh-poohed the notion that Kansas City is favored by officials, the game was not four minutes old when he took issue with a call that went the defending champion’s way.
On a fourth-and-2 from midfield, Jalen Hurts found A.J. Brown inside the Kansas City 20, but Brown was called for interfering with KC’s Trent McDuffie. Replays showed Brown did touch McDuffie in the face, but Brady took issue with the call.
“Ooooh, don’t like that one bit,” he said. “This is too critical of a game. The hand fighting is going on down the field.”
Brady asked rules analyst Mike Pereira what he thought, and he said, “I think it’s one that did not need to be called.”
Said Brady, “I always thought in these games you let the players play. It should be decided on the field. Don’t like that call to start the game.”
Brady later disagreed with a 15-yard penalty against McDuffie for an aggressive hit on the Eagles’ Dallas Goedert. “Not much there, either,” Brady said.
Play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt jokingly said, “Well, you’re 0-for-2.”
One of the greatest values Brady brings to a telecast naturally is his experience in these situations as a player — 10 of them all told.
Early on, he referenced his slow starts in most Super Bowls. Later, he talked about how his Buccaneers beat Mahomes in Super Bowl LV, 31-9, using a similar formula of pressuring Mahomes to distraction.
As the game got out of hand down the stretch, Brady switched into storytelling mode and continued to leverage his experience in every Super Bowl situation.
He recalled the losing feeling he had after the Giants shocked his previously undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
“I got on the bus after the game and I had absolutely believed 100% we were going to win,” Brady said. “It was just devastating because I couldn’t speak for the rest of the night.”
He said he would wake up after such losses and think, “That’s a nightmare. That game didn’t happen. I was dreaming and we lost badly, but we haven’t actually played the game yet.”
Burkhardt, working his second Super Bowl, deftly conveyed the shock of the Eagles’ domination and did what he could to keep viewers engaged throughout.
Fox’s biggest fumble was its new graphic look, featuring a score “bug” that was weirdly large, with a blocky font.
But given how things went, Eagles fans likely enjoyed it. The bigger that shocking score looked on their screens, the better.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
