Tom Brady opened his third season as Fox's lead NFL analyst with a show-and-tell moment. Calling Sunday's Commanders-Eagles game at Lincoln Financial Field alongside Kevin Burkhardt, the seven-time Super Bowl champion pulled out the actual play-call sheet the Patriots used during their Super Bowl LI comeback win over the Falcons.
âÂÂHey, they got play sheets, why can't I get a call sheet too? I actually brought this in, this is my Super Bowl 51 call sheet,â Brady said in the panel. âÂÂMe and Josh McDaniels called this a Picasso by the time we got to the game.âÂÂ
Article Continues BelowA piece of history.@TomBrady really brought in his call sheet from the @Patriots' iconic Super Bowl LI comeback win over the Falcons. pic.twitter.com/YkJ0Du1G5G
â FOX Sports (@FOXSports) September 13, 2026
Brady did not bring it in to relive the 25-point comeback. He used it to break down how play-calling actually works at the NFL level, walking viewers through how the sheet is organized. âÂÂYou can just see, everything's segmented. I think the viewer at home should really take notice,â he said. âÂÂThese are the runs from two receiver groupings. That's runs from one receiver grouping. That's three receiver groupings. Everything is really segmented. You see third down, you see red area.âÂÂ
His larger point was that coaches are not scanning a wall of options in the moment. âÂÂEverything is really specific to the situation that they're actually doing. They're not just looking randomly down at 120 calls,â Brady said. âÂÂThey're actually looking at a very segmented set of plays in each situation that allows them to pick the right one.âÂÂ
The sheet itself offered a genuine look inside a championship game plan. Visible entries included a play labeled âÂÂG Trips RT 64 Slush Bootâ under quick dropback passes for first and second down, and âÂÂZing Echo LT Boom 79 Z Malone H Lookâ listed among the two-point plays New England would famously need. Several categories also carried Falcons tendencies, noting that Atlanta played man coverage on every third-and-6-to-9 snap and lined up in four-down fronts 60 percent of the time in that situation.
Not everyone appreciated the trip down memory lane, with some fans on social media accusing Brady of steering the broadcast back toward his own career. The Eagles won the game 24-22, extending Nick Sirianni's Week 1 record to 6-0.

