As third quarter began following the Cowboys’ victory over the Browns on Sunday afternoon, Fox commentator Kevin Burkhardt turned to his new on-air partner Tom Brady for advice on what Cleveland needed to do to revive its flagging offense. “How do they move the ball and get something going here?” Burkhardt asked. One would assume the man regarded as the greatest quarterback of all time would have an original idea or two to offer viewers at home on the subject. Brady nodded confidently and replied, “In order to move forward, they have to stop moving backwards.” Burkhardt laughed, but the look in his eyes showed that he was crying on the inside. Is that what $375 million can buy these days?

Brady’s TV debut was perhaps the most anticipated sporting event of the year, a story that the media covered with breathless intensity in the lead-up to NFL kickoff weekend. The former New England Patriots legend signed a $375 million deal with Fox in 2022 to become their lead Sunday football commentator for the next decade, and spent much of 2023 preparing for his new role – studying the work of other analysts, consulting the sport’s wise old heads for tips on how to best navigate the transition from the field to the commentary booth, and commentating live behind closed doors for practice games. As if his reputation as a divine player and the fortune Fox gives him for his insights didn’t already generate enough expectations, Brady has also taken on the analyst position at a time when the pressure of comparison has perhaps never been greater for Fox. By taking the seat alongside Burkhardt, Brady displaces Greg Olsen, who won rave reviews in the color film’s lead role last season for his on-screen eloquence, charm and rare ability to meld narrative and data into a compelling, explanatory whole.

Fox promoted its star recruit’s debut with bombastic relentlessness during Sunday’s first games, interrupting coverage of the helpless teams that happened to lose at 1 p.m. and showing key footage of Brady fist-bumping Burkhardt and chatting with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who was wearing killer sunglasses. A commercial that ended with the tagline “TOM BRADY IS BACK TO WORK” played on a loop, featuring Brady’s past selves addressing the modern generation and explaining why it was so important for him to become a sportscaster despite already being fabulously rich. “What they don’t understand is that you live and breathe football because you’re Tom f***ing Brady!” the New England Patriots’ Brady tells the modern Brady in the ad.

The Brady love affair on Fox Sunday was so overwhelming and inescapable that it eventually swallowed the object of its desire and devolved into a kind of televised masturbation. During the Cowboys-Browns game, a new Tostito commercial aired featuring Brady and former teammate Julian Edelman; Fox split the screen to show Brady reacting to his own commercial, his face frozen in a rigid grin. All elite athletes are exhibitionists of some sort, but I didn’t expect “Tom Brady watches himself perform” to be a major part of Fox’s new Sunday football package.

The build-up was so grandiose that it almost immediately seemed like a disappointment when the real event finally arrived. Burkhardt and Brady started well enough, a few jaws in the media box smiling through rows of gleaming teeth, but then Brady started talking. And that’s when it all started to go wrong. Brady, the 199th pick in the 2000 NFL Draft, once said he was grateful to the New England Patriots for giving him a chance because then he “didn’t have to be an insurance salesman.” He may have dodged a career in the insurance industry, but unfortunately for football fans, Brady has not escaped the voice of an insurance salesman. Burkhardt has a classic, honey-sweet delivery; Brady, on the other hand, is a pure show-off, and his feeble chatter in the opening minutes of Sunday’s game did nothing to dispel the feeling that the winningest quarterback of all time was perhaps nervous for the first time. With that prepubescent squeak, the words seemed to pour out of Brady’s mouth in choppy torrents that neither made sense on their own nor came together to form proper sentences: “Just a good example here – Parsons is lining up – in different places.”

Even when the words came out more fluently, the thoughts they contained were invariably dull and clichéd: Brady’s first-half stat sheet alone featured a “high-IQ football,” at least three instances of “he’s just so athletic” and a Dan Marino quote deployed as a radiant Hail Mary when it became desperately obvious that Brady was nearing the end of a sentence and couldn’t think of a natural way to finish it. Brady greeted KaVontae Turpin’s miraculous touchdown after a blazing 60-yard run with a weak “Oh!”, and his analysis of a first-half sack by Micah Parsons was so generic it barely met the analytical standard of a dad chugging beer on the couch: “This guy faces more double coverage than anyone else. He’s just too athletic. That’s what you deal with when you’re a great rusher. You have two against you and you think: ‘You know what, put two against me, it doesn’t matter.'”

This was a big-screen debut with all the pizzazz of a Friday afternoon Zoom presentation from HR. Between lifeless exchanges with Burkhardt (they thought they were on camera more often, LOL!), Brady rambled on and on about the power and importance of “the organization,” especially in the context of Dak Prescott’s historic inability to make the most of his obvious talent. “If you want to be a great player, you want to be pushed and challenged,” “discipline and accountability are cornerstones of any successful organization”: There was a lot of that stuff. And look, that may all be true, at least as far as pro football goes, but it makes for awfully boring television.

Listening to these moronic hymns to organizational order, it was hard to escape the feeling that Brady was a true corporate guy, the kind of narcissist who would tuck his shirt in and berate his coworkers for not showing up for special “game days” that employees were asked to attend on their day off. That spirit of discipline and loyalty may have been good for Brady as a player, but it doesn’t make him a convincing game analyst. To be fair, that first shift behind the microphone wasn’t uniformly terrible—there were a few passable attempts to explain Prescott’s improvisational talents, and Brady showed no fear of using the highlighter on the screen—but it was all a bit dull. And if there’s one thing a person of color can’t possibly be, it’s colorless.

Brady Is a company man, even after his playing days are over: He’s already tied to Fox, and his offer to own 10% of the Las Vegas Raiders is expected to be approved by the league before the end of this season. The NFL has limited Brady’s freedom of movement and expression on Fox in light of his impending move to ownership: He can’t say anything too critical about game officials and has no access to teams’ facilities and practices. Without those restrictions, would Brady be more interesting to the future owner? That seems unlikely. When you’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a decade of chattering game analysis, the incentive to snipe at players and officials is slim to none; the potential conflicts of interest are sidestepped before they even arise. Perhaps the bravest thing Fox’s new headliner said on Sunday was this: “It’s hard to make 10 yards, it’s harder to make 15, and it’s very, very hard to make 20.”

Of course, it’s still early, and Brady has ten years to grow into the role and a fortune to ease the pain of any criticism. But to achieve even a tenth of the greatness he displayed as a player, he would have to do things – develop a personality, for example, or be willing to criticize players and the league, or maybe even have a different voice – that the seven-time Super Bowl champion seems incapable of doing. The verdicts already seem ready for the tombstone. Tom Brady: indomitable quarterback, skilled navigator of conflicts of interest, determined smiler, mediocre TV talent.