For The Win
It was just two years ago that Kevin Burkhardt was preparing to call his first Super Bowl for Fox Sports, and as he told USA TODAY Sports in 2023, the magnitude of what he was about to do hit him when he learned he’d be calling the 57th edition of the NFL’s championship game.
“The day after I was told, I went online and looked up how many play-by-play guys had called the Super Bowl,” Burkhardt said. “It was not lost on me that the number is 11. It’s a job that not many people in the world have had the luck or the fortune to do. I don’t take it lightly.”
Then, he added, “It’s history, is what it is.”
After becoming announcer No. 11, Burkhardt continued his terrific run on the mic. But the play-by-play announcer has a different challenge this time around as Fox is set to broadcast Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans: he’s got a different partner next to him.
He called that first Super Bowl with Greg Olsen, whom he had known for 20 years before they were paired together in the Fox lead booth.
Now, Tom Brady is his partner on the air for the big game.
He and Burkhardt called a season’s worth of games together, developing the kind of chemistry that NFL viewers enjoy from a broadcast booth. And to Brady’s credit, we’ve seen a vast improvement since a Week 1 filled with awkward pauses and stumbles. He seems much more relaxed on the air.
But there’s an additional challenge Brady faces, in addition to being a rookie calling his first Super Bowl as a broadcaster: As a minority owner in the Las Vegas Raiders, he has a list of restrictions on what he’s allowed to say on the air and what he has to avoid in order not to break NFL rules (although the league is relaxing some of those for him this week).
With all of that in mind, let’s look back at the year that brought Brady to calling his first Super Bowl after winning seven of them as the legendary quarterback of the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers:
After signing a reported 10-year and $375 million deal with Fox and agreeing in 2023 to buy a minority stake with the Las Vegas Raiders, Brady kicks off Week 1 of the season while calling the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns matchup. Critics noted his struggles to describe what he was seeing that contributed to some dead air. Clearly, he was nervous.
Burkhardt and Brady had their best exchange of the year so far. Burkhardt asked Brady if the former quarterback would throw again to Cowboys receiver Jalen Brooks – who had slipped during a play, leading to an interception – if he was Dallas’s quarterback. Brady’s answer:
“Not today. It’s actually pretty tough to go back there. Because...
