It doesn’t matter if you have won the Super Bowl 7 times; once you are in the broadcast booth, you have to be on your toes just like everybody else, as Tom Brady is finding out right now. During a recent FOX NFL telecast, lead play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt put his broadcast partner, Brady, on the spot over a microphone issue that disrupted their booth communication.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
Instead of glossing over the technical hiccup, Burkhardt called out Brady on air. The 7x Super Bowl Champ did not hesitate to take the blame, confessing what had actually happened with a smile on his face.
“Okay, my fault. I have this big clunky board which I have all this information about what I want to say all day, and I dropped it on the talk-back button. And I’m sitting here going, ‘God, I can’t hear anyone. You guys…’ and it’s my fault the whole time…That’s like a quarterback owning up to his mistake. I like it.”
During live broadcasting, the talk-back switch is essential, as it allows the commentators to talk directly to their production team off the air to prepare, get their facts right, understand how they’re doing, etc.
Instead of passing the blame onto FOX audio engineers, Brady took full ownership of the mishap with a big grin, displaying the accountability that has helped him script his journey so far.
Learning how to navigate the technology in an NFL broadcast booth is notoriously tough for former players. Even veteran analyst Cris Collinsworth has previously recalled his early broadcasting struggles, noting,
“I had no idea what I was doing. No idea what the talk-back button was, how to look at replays. There was no road map. Nobody told you anything,” Collinsworth had revealed just five days before Brady made his broadcasting debut.
However, this wasn’t Brady’s only broadcasting stumble. Just last week, he used the phrase “p—s missile” to describe a deep pass during the Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Commanders Week 2 game.
“I’m actually kind of embarrassed. There’s a lot of grandmas at home that probably aren’t very happy with my mouth on FOX… That swear jar is getting way too full in my house,” Brady said later while issuing an apology.
During his 23 seasons dominating the NFL, Tom Brady built a legendary career on obsessive preparation, famously memorizing defensive schemes and entire playbooks down to the smallest detail.
He brought that exact same relentless routine into the television world, even joking on The Pat McAfee Show before making the on-air debut that he had compiled so much research from shadow sessions with veteran play-by-play announcers that he could “probably write a broadcasting playbook at this point.”
But in the fast-moving chaos of live network television, carrying that much homework can quite literally backfire, as it did on Sunday of Week 4 in the 2026 NFL season.